Is Chitika comming back

As we know at the end of April Chitika declined many websites and moved to pending review status.
It created a lot of noise from publishers side, and I actually one of them. It was no proper communication from Chitika administration and we received general responses from Chitika support.

Today (May 19, 2010) I found that all my websites moved to "Approved - Silver" and one to "Approved - Gold".
Here is what that means:
Gold - Chitika Premium ads for Enterprise level, large/ComScore 500 sites
Silver - Higher quality advertisers, targeted ads
Bronze - Standard, untargeted/backfill ads

I actually see slight increase in number of impressions (still 50 times less compared to what it was before), but not in number of clicks, CTR is 3 times less and average CPC is very low at $0.02

Is it means that Chitika slowly coming back? Did somebody else saw similar changes on his end?

 

Yea, same for me too. All my sites were approved to Silver yesterday. I see increase in impressions (still lesser than what it was originally), but CPC is pathetic at 0.01. I was being patient till now with them, but if it continues like this I will dump Chitika over the weekend.

Do you mind sharing how many US/Canada visitors do you get monthly on the website that was approved in Gold status?

 

My sites are also approved to silver. I'm still evaluating if it is worthy to stay with them.

 

All but one of mine are silver also. Did get one Gold, but I still don't see any reason for two of my older domains to be Silver (Not approved for Gold ads (not enough user data)) while the one goes to Gold got just over one percent of the traffic of one Silver site and just under two and a half percent of the other site.

 

There doesn't seems to be any consistent rules for classifying domains as Silver/Gold. To test this, I submitted 3 websites. Two of them have been showing Chitika forever, but the 3rd one never showed Chitika ads. So, Chitika does not knows impressions/traffic from that website.

Interestingly, they approved all three websites as Silver. That's quite weird.

As I mentioned earlier, I will just check my earnings for next 2 days, and if it doesn't improves, I am going to get rid of Chitika over the weekend. Quite fed up with them.

 

The one with Gold has very low traffic.
My most visited websites with Canada/US are silver now. These sites were generating (as per Chitika good time reports, before April 27th) 25k daily impressions. Now it is around 400, while few days ago were around 200 impressions.

I have no idea what was the criteria they did this step. But, the site that is on gold now, was actually the only one left in approved state.
May be there is some pattern here. i.e.:
approved moved to gold
pending moved to silver

One more thing to add, just changed today, the silver domains are with following comment: Pending Approval for Gold.

 

You have made a very good point here. That might indeed be the pattern. May be I need to sit tight for a few more days. On your Gold site, is CPC back to what it originally used to be?

 

The gold one had and has very, very low traffic and may be few clicks. It is hard to make any conclusions based on this small number of impressions and clicks. But for sure CPC is much much lower now.

BTW, I also notice that reports are coming now almost on time.
One of the websites, that Chitika announced on their blog, that reported 97% increase after Chitika|Select does not showing any Chitika ads anymore. They removed them completely.

I don't believe in co-incidents, but first YPN announced to small publishers that they closing the program and suggested to move to Chitika. Then Chitika started having some performance issues, site availability went down, reports got delayed on a daily basis, then week after Chitika suspended all (may be all) it's publishers. I'm sure all this related to YPN small advertisers/publishers program ending. May be Chitika took over YPN, including their advertisers and in this case Chitika should follow the same terms and conditions YPN had. This could result in massive re-approval process for "legacy" Chitika publishers like us. Of course since it was no proper official announcement all this is just my assumptions. I hope Chitikawill come back as it was before or even stronger.

 

I was lucky that I checked my Chitika account right on 29ths of April and found out what happened. There are also rumors that Google is taking over Chitika - in that case Chitika is packing up and did not inform publishers about domain drop to get free ads for as long as publishers were not aware of.

But if its taking over YPN, that would be good news, I hope. For now, I won't waste any ads space for Chitika, not until my domains get gold approval.

 

I completely agree that the whole fiasco is related to them acquiring YPN. They tried to bit more than they can chew. This whole thing really sucks.

Any better alternatives than Chitika, that can be used in conjunction with Adsense?

 

I've been using Adgeni.com and they are quite good, paypal alertpay and western union payouts. Advertising is also good

 

any word on if google is taking them over for sure?

 

I'm new to this information but it is good to see the discussion about search-targeted advertising networks.

 

After a lot wait finally my website www.magicaldentistry.com got approved for chitika silver ads, I think they will do better.