Chitika Review – Adding Chitika Can Only Increase Your Potential Ad Revenue is not 100% True!
Okay, it’s funny how Chitika is responding to my blog post earlier and I think they are actually getting desperate now, I have been seeing these Chitika ads with Darren Rowse posed as their posterboy all of the sudden.
Upon clicking on that ad, you will be directed to this page where you get a YouTube video like this:
Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode
Now, here’s a big lie that I cannot handle and Chitika has not responded back to me other than that they don’t have time to fix the issue with CPC sabotage:
So adding Chitika to your page can only increase your potential ad revenue.
What they forgot to address is that adding Chitika along with Adsense can potentially decrease your potential ad revenue simply because law of supply and demand.
The law of supply and demand says when you have more supply than demand, your earning will decrease.
This is exactly what can happen when you add Chitika to your “high-paying” keyworded websites.
As far as I can tell, advertisers pay much less money per click for Chitika ads than on Adwords. This means that Chitika ads are actually flooding the Adwords market. The more people use Chitika, the more of Adsense/Adwords market is flooded, meaning everyone will get paid less per click.
The reason why I am posting this is because Chitika is really now becoming an ad network degrades the Adsense network, provided you use Chitika with Adsense. This could possibly affect millions of website revenues out there because advertisers can get the same keywords for much less on Chitika.
Also see LiewCF’s blog post on how his test went by removing Chitika.
While this is great for advertisers, this will flood the Adsense market for all the honest, hard-working publishers out there.
If you don’t believe me, I want you to try this, take Chitika off for at least a month and see how your Adsense revenue looks. My Adsense revenue has literally exploded since taking out Chitika from all my websites. And this extra revenue could be over $100,000 for the last couple years I have used Chitika.
Why is Darren Rowse using/promoting Chitika?
I think partly because either Chitika is paying him to endorse them and/or Darren Rowse was given a special revenue-share for his famous blogger status. Whatever the case, I would really like to know because Darren Rowse should be disclosing that kind of information in his blog posts. I like Darren Rowse and he is a nice guy but I’ve e-mailed him about this Chitika incident and no replies yet. I am guessing that he doesn’t want to respond because Darren has responded to all of my past e-mails/questions.
Also some proof from back in 2005.
Seriously, Darren, I would like to know, this is very important for ALL web publishers/bloggers out there who are trying to make a dollar out of a penny. We all work hard as you do, we just don’t want to sabotage our own CPC markets. Besides that, the reason I started using Chitika was because Darren started using it. Now, I feel like a dumbass. I like Darren Rowse’s blogging business but this is certainly not fun to find out years later than I’ve been using a service that had degraded my ad network. I really hope Darren Rowse addresses this issue, otherwise I will have to part my ways with one of my online heroes. Disclosure is now actually part of FCC, bloggers need to disclose that they get paid from a company if they promote it on their blog posts or companies use them to promote themselves online.
What peeves now is that Chitika (again) has stopped responding to my requests but using their last, desperate measures to advertise their services with Darren Rowse as their posterboy. (or that’s what I assume because I have never seen Adsense Chitika ads before this week)
Look, I don’t hate anyone but I simply don’t want Chitika sending out false message that adding Chitika can “ONLY” increase your ad revenue. Simply thinking and law of supply and demand says Chitika can possibly add more revenue only if you are getting already bad revenues with Adsense. But for those of you getting pretty good revenue stream through Adsense, Chitika can only decrease your ad revenues unless Chitika offers you a super-high revenue-share and that is most unlikely as I have experienced myself.
As for search-query only ads? That is the highest-paying CPC revenues and Chitika is flooding your highest paying keywords.
How can Chitika Fix This for Everyone?
They need to find the right market value for every keyword. They need to build a system that’s going to be competitive with Adsense. Their CPC can still be much cheaper than Adsense since CTR is much higher on average but they need to work out a new system that won’t sabotage the existing CPC markets publishers are using such as Adsense.
When they can do that, I think Chitika would be a great alternative, until then, mark my words, you will most likely sabotage your own high-paying Adsense CPCs by adding Chitika along with it.
Chitika, stop goofing off and please fix the issue NOW.
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February 28th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
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February 28th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I’ve been promoting Chitika as a way to make money from blogs since they launched their eMiniMall ad unit 4-5 years ago. I promoted it as an affiliate (which I disclosed) but also because it was an ad unit that performed brilliantly for me on my product related blogs.
At the time I wrote a number of reviews of Chitika in which I pointed out that it worked well on some blog that I owned but not others. I found at the time that it did best on sites that had product niches (ie I write about cameras, it performed well on those topics because it served ads for products that my readers were buying) but not on other sites (for example I tested it on ProBlogger and it did poorly there as it didn’t have relevant products to serve ads for).
Chitika have since released a number of other ad units – some of which perform even better than the eMiniMalls for me and which seem to work on a wider range of sites – but probably still not every type of site (as with any type of ad unit, there’s no ad network that works perfectly on all sites).
I can’t speak to Chitikas marketing or promotion of their products – but they have worked very very well for me which is why I’ve endorsed them.
I am an affiliate for them (and a number of other networks that I use and believe in) and don’t hide that fact (I’ve specifically disclosed it in a number of posts) but I have allowed my head on their ads as its a product I know, use successfully and recommend.
I’d also say that for me (and I can’t speak for everyone) that adding Chitika ads to my blogs (which also feature AdSense) led to a significant increase in my overall revenue. I thought I’d see a decrease in my AdSense income when I added Chitika – it may have had a slight decrease on some sites because I replaced some AdSense units with Chitika ones – but I’ve seen revenue from both significantly increase since using Chitika.
I do earn more from AdSense than Chitika but that’s because I’m more aggressive with my AdSense ads on some sites than I am with Chitika and because AdSense shows their ads to all traffic but I am using Chitika more to target search traffic and they only show ads to people in some locations.
All I can really advise bloggers is that they should test a variety of monetization options on their blogs. I’ve had 30 or so blogs over the years and they all monetize so differently. Chitika is one of many options and it will perform brilliantly on some blogs but less so on others – so test the options and go with what works for you.
February 28th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
PS: you mentioned you’ve emailed me about this. Can I ask when this was? I’ve just done a few minutes of searching on my Gmail account for the email and can’t find any emails about Chitika from anyone for quite some time and none are from a Max. Feel free to resend it if you have more questions – you have my direct email address from this comment.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Great thanks Darren, I thought you were hiding from this but thanks for clearing that up.
Btw, I still have the e-mail I sent you via zedomax [at]gmaildotcom, you probably get a ton of e-mail, perhaps it was just an oversight.
Like you say, it should be better with a better performing niche but for me, my results have been terrible. I run various different blogs ranging from topics like bags, rings, mattresses, tech, and more. On Adsense, my tech blog performs the worst while other niche topics do 10 times better (which I won’t say because of Adsense ToS here).
My Chitika revenue has never reflected that, no matter what my niche, my CPC stays at most 12 cents per click. I don’t know if it’s just me but it seems to be happening to most smaller publishers who are using Chitika if I research online.
According to what you are saying, certain niches like cameras could be outperforming or at least on par with Adsense right? If that is, I think it’s only happening for you.
You are a well known publisher, Chitika is going to treat you right because of that but I am saying Chitika should treat everyone the same, it’s not fair for small to medium publishers like me who are getting their revenue share ripped off.
That is my point and I know you may be promoting Chitika but I want you to know that some publishers like me are getting screwed on the deal.
No matter what niche blog I put Chitika, my results are very low/poor.
I know for a fact that some of my niches should perform 10 times better than others, Chitika does not reflect that at all nor do they have an answer for my questions.
I have asked Chitika to see what is wrong and all I get is answer that they will look into it next month because they are busy with a new project. This is the same answer I get for the last 12 months, that is a huge problem if Chitika is indeed doing this just so they can take all the profit for themselves.
Whatever the case, it seems like Chitika is giving you only the special deal to keep you happy, that’s what I would like you to know. It’s not fair and this is something Chitika has to fix yesteryear.
I know you care about your online brand but if you are promoting Chitika and they are clearly screwing with small publishers, you should really do something about it, at least talk to Chitika so it doesn’t happen.
You can easily find a lot of this if you Google it, there’s a lot of angry publishers out there, perhaps it’s true a lot of their niches might not perform well on Chitika but I have experienced that niches really don’t matter. I have a certain “feel” that Chitika is controlling the CPCs, only giving higher CPCs towards famous publishers.
Anyways, thanks for your reply, I appreciate your responses as always.
I am really done here, this is just frustrating to think that I have sabotaged my own CPCs and Chitika reps were never clear nor honest to tell me about it nor did anything to help me out in anyway. It’s not rocket science and I bought into their marketing for 3 years.
April 26th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
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