Google's First Real Competition: Alternative to Adsense Revenues

Google's AdSense has been available to website and blog publishers for about three years. It's been a gold mine for a lot of little people so far. And Google has not had to deal with any competition in the contextual advertising arena.

This is changing drastically over the next few months. Yahoo is now testing a very similar contextual advertising program and this will likely be available to publishers sometime in the next few weeks. The MSN AdCenter is also expected to be available within a few months.

But these big guns were beaten to the starting gate by a relatively small company called Chitika. Chitika has sprung out of nowhere to provide an innovative new format for contextual advertising.

As the highly effective Google text ads have been around for three years, many people have surely developed 'banner blindness' to them, given they've been bombarded with them on most sites for a long time now.

Enter Chitika, whose ads are visually very interesting, and completely different from both banner ads and Google text ads.

If I was one of the larger banner advertising companies, I'd be worried about the arrival of Chitika. As an example, as a small-time publisher, I immediately nixed my LinkShare Network and Clickbank banners. These ads produced very little revenue for me and I can see how Chitika will be much more effective.

There is a first mover advantage here. If you are one of the first few thousand websites to set up an account with Chitika, you are likely going to benefit quite a bit from the novelty of the ad presentation. This will be especially true if you are one of the first websites in your niche to try Chitika. People will naturally click more because the new ad format will pique their curiosity. Once they've clicked a few times for different products, I would expect the clickthrough rates will tumble. But this may take a few months. Chitika is just out of the starting gate now.

Another potential pitfall with Chitika is that the ads only seem to be substantially profitable for the kind of websites that deal specifically with consumer and electronic goods. For example, if you have a high-ranking website on digital cameras or cars or baby strollers, and people come to you looking for specific product information, you can sincerely expect to rake in the money with Chitika. On more general topics, don't expect a high clickthrough and expect the revenues to be significantly lower than with Google's AdSense.

However, overall, if you are a website or blog publisher with some good traffic, I'd say jump on the Chitika bandwagon while the going is good. It's not necessary to remove your Google ads as Chitika has made it easy to customize for advertising which complies with Google's AdSense policies.

I've got a couple of small sites but Chitika approved my account within an hour. It was also a very easy sign-up.

To check out how they look on my site and for more info about their revenue program for publishers see The Teleporting Tattler.

http://TeleportingTattler.com