Readers who have been trying out Chitika’s eMiniMalls will no doubt be aware that on 7 – 8 October they had some issues with their statistics. They reported in the stats area:
‘On October 7th and 8th our reporting system experienced an intermittent outage for a few hours. The problem has now been rectified. Due to this outage, you will notice that the stats for October 7th are missing. The stats for October 8th might also be slightly deflated. However, please be assured that we will make every effort to reprocess the stats, calculate and compensate for any lost revenue. We thank you for your patience and support while we iron out the reporting issues. Thank you.’
I’ve had a number of emails from readers asking what I could tell them about this outage and how they would be compensated.
As I have not formal association with Chitika (I’m just a publisher like the rest of us) I thought I’d approach my contact there for an official comment. This is what they responded with:
we had some log issues on the 7th and 8th.
There are two aspects to this:
1) Revenue: For this, we will compensate people in a “very fair” way. What is a “very fair” way ? Something like taking their revenue from their best day in the month or something like that
2) The actual stats for analysis: Some people are running tests and would like to know what happened. This is less of a priority. If we cannot recover from the log issues, the stats for the 7th will remain blank. And the stats for 8th will remain deflated.
So there you have the official word for those of you concerned with those two days.
I would add that it’s worth keeping in mind that if you’re running eMiniMalls that you are participating in a beta test which means that while the product is working well that there is the risk of some instability from time to time.
Thanks for passing that on. I was just waiting to see what would come of the outage and an explanation of the compensation. Over all I am happy with the mini malls I think it will become a really great product.
Heh! I love this company. They could have made hundreds of excuses. Instead they come up with a concept called “very fair”. From the looks of it, I think I am going to be making more money on the 7th than expected. Cheers!
Unfortunately I picked October 7 as a grand experiment to place all of my ads on one site with Chitika’s eminimalls. (Note to self, don’t place all eggs (or ads) in one basket.) So I got an extra dose of bad luck there. :( But there are other things about Chitika that are bothering me.
I’ve sent them five support emails over the past two weeks and none of them have been responded to. I’ve tried from two different email addresses and I (and my ISP) don’t have any spam blockers that would have prevented their email reaching me.
Then today I received an email from them (but not in response to my support questions) saying “I wanted to follow up since I have noticed that you are not yet using our code”…. which isn’t correct either as I have impressions and revenue going back to September 26.
Hopefully things will turn around and I’ll be as happy with them as everyone else seems to be.
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Sorry, but I didn’t understand the second point. How will they tell who’s running a test and who is not?
I’m serving chitika 50%-50% with adsense in 90% of my site (which receives 20.000 page views daily) as a test of conversion and not as a test of the product. I tested it the first day and it worked great.
I decided to let my Adsense earning go down in favor of finding the correct percentage of serving. So it is not fair not to be paid for october 7 and half of october 8. So, how are they deciding what is a test and what is not?
Enrique
Oops, sorry, in point 2, they mean STATS and not REVENUE.
Enrique
I got the same email as Tim today. Didn’t bother me, I just replied and told them I am using it and blah blah blah. What was interesting about the email was that it had a link to a “See what other bloggers have to say….” section and guess who’s blog was linked?
It is a beta test people!
I’LL SUE!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!1!
Wow, thanks for this advice! I signed up for Chitika as soon as I read this entry!
Whoops, actually it was another entry. No matter.
“…..Something like taking their revenue from their best day in the month or something like that…..”
The stats outage came at a bad time for Chitika, just at a time when the eminimall name was buzzing on webmaster boards across the web.
Some Adsense publishers complained of indifferent targeting, falling CTR rates and smart pricing woes, particularly at the start of october. Because of this many were ready to give another contextual ad network a shot. Unfortunately for Chitika, the lost statistics issue put some off.
However, to offer publishers sizeable compensation for the lost revenue is an excellent resolution. We’ll continue to recommend Chitika eminimalls to our contacts, and are pleased to be part of the beta test.
Heh, I’ve had a similar email from Amazon.com stating that I wasn’t using their code – what they probably meant is that no-one had clicked. I’ve given up on Amazon, I get barely any revenue from them.
My point is that it’s not just the new guys that don’t always appear to know exactly what’s going on. I’m pretty impressed with Chitika so far. They’re measuring up favourably with AdSense though I probably haven’t provided their systems enough clickthroughs to really target ads properly – I still get some weird ones even on the sites I am using their contextual system. Then again, AdSense still does that.