Bottomline is, that they want to use our adspace for nearly free, as it is for most publishers with low CTR or no clicks at all. It can also be suspected that due to only one time update per day that they take off clicks right away so that there is no record then in anyway.
I only know and registered with http://www.idea.live.com which belongs to MSN and which is in beta and have received the Windowsฎ OneCare[SIZE=-2]TM[/SIZE] Live beta. Well, it's here: Comprehensive PC health service for people who have other things to think about. I've never seen any hints for publishers though, if so, is there a link someone can provide? I just checked the link, tryed to login in and MSN confessed that they have messed up, so I have to try to login later. That's what they asked for. The link is http://www.live.com
No, there is definitely not an invite-only beta for publishers at MSN. There IS an invite-only beta for MSN AdCenter for advertisers though. Here is the only public thing they have said about a potential publisher program.
There is a user here on DP named "adCenter" He's an official MSN rep. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=38120&highlight=ADCENTER
What needs to happen is they don't show you the unaudited revenue at all. They filter out clicks day by day, and just show you what you're actually making. I'm assuming this is roughly what Google does (correct me if you know better). This way no one feels they are losing giant sums of money. No one feels as if they are getting scammed. If that doesn't happen soon, I think Chitika is in trouble. Gary
http://chitika.com/blog/?p=30 I am not a Chitika publisher. I was thinking the idea over though... Reading the above link brings up more questions for me than answers honestly. The answer that bothers me most is: [cite]Since our merchant partners were not willing to pay for the clicks on product names, we decided to stop displaying links that will not earn revenue to you. Second, we are not getting paid for curiosity clicks either on the product title. In fact, the product title is not click able at all because we actually removed the link from the product name. Why introduce a non-revenue earning link when we cannot compensate the publishers for the resulting leads? If we can bring on board merchants who are interested in recognizing the “branding value†for the product title clicks, we will update the units accordingly so that you can earn more revenue.[/cite] If I understand this correctly, they designed their PPC ads with non-PPC links in them?! The whole idea of "curiosity clicks" seems a little... uh, off? They seem to be deciding for the user what the user's intent was. It is certainly interesting to see the difference between raw click stats and the audited ones (from what people claim). Sorry to those who got burned.
I'm one of those who lost about 70% in their little "audit". I can totally understand fradulent clicks and them wanting to get rid of that, but the problem comes in with that for an entire month they report one thing but then pay MUCH less than that. So in my book where Chitika flaws is that their reporting system sucks. You don't tell somebody they made $500 and then after audit they only made $150. It was complete waste of my ad space and so they got dropped...and a nasty little email from me