Maybe that geo-targetting will help for the publishers. Although, being canadian myself, I hate surfing and clicking on other people’s ads and getting “Sorry-your are out of advertisers area” message. Those alternate URL should be forced in those cases. We can create code to give a rough idea what to show, but we know nothing about the advertisers’ geo preferences being displayed.

The payoff has been very, very low: a small percentage of what Google or Yahoo do. I gave them a small percentage of my page views, but even when I tried increasing that, the results were dismal: $3.00 for the same number of pageviews that would bring in $30.00 on Google or Yahoo.

But I *like* the ads, and I just do not understand why they don’t do better. They are on-target, they look good, it just doesn’t make sense. When I hear Darren and other people say they are doing well, I believe them: these *should* do well. But for some reason they just do not work for me.

I was going to say I might as well let ‘em run out the month, but really, it’s pointless. A 10% bonus on a couple of bucks doesn’t amount to anything. Even Amazon does better than this.

As it stands, advertisers can place full responsibility on Chitika for poor ad performance. Chitika should take a lesson from Adsense and distribute the responsibility for ad performance.

I believe Chitika promised exceptional click rates to advertisers and they have delivered exactly that. I’m also convinced that advertisers translate high click through to high conversion. When that didn’t happen Chitika was took full responsibility, that’s just not appropriate.

Chitika is a wonderful business model with high potential for advertisers and promoters. In order to pull it off they are going to have to shift some of the responsibility back to the advertisers by requiring them to actively participate in ad writing (descriptions). So when an ad under performs it’s not just Chitika that is held responsible.

its a bit of a bizarre one – on one level I understand it but it seems strange that they have to make it harder to click an ad to make it more valuable to advertisers. :-)

Hey James, I really dig your site :) You might consider targeting *specific* products you think your readers would be interested in…also, I would highly recommend Chitika Ads on your individual post pages, either directly above or directly below your post…this is the placement that does well on my sites.

To compound Chitika’s faults, I suspect there’ll be a massive Chitika backlash eventually. Their ads are incredibly distinctive and seem to be popping up everywhere. I already ignore them, and I expect Chitika ad-blindness will be a growing problem.

A little short-term loss for long-term gain isn’t a problem for me at all.

In terms of the referral program – yep you’re right. I do use it (along with every other Tom Dick and Harry. But I don’t use it in every post (including this one).

I think I’m pretty fair with my review of Chitika. I’ve acknowledged a low CTR in my review of it as well as other negatives including that it doesn’t perform as well on non product sites, that their statistics has a lot of room to grow etc.

Yep my experience is excellent overall in terms of earnings – it’s been around triple Adsense the past week – so why wouldn’t I rave about it? I attempt to contain my excitement about it and give realistic reviews but sometimes I guess it all just bubbles over.

It all depends on the products displayed in the Chitika ads.

I’m in a fairly tight niche, and the click values on my Chitika ads are more consistent than AdSense, but when everything is averaged out, my click value is higher on AdSense.

As for the CTR, I have my Chitika ads optimized quite well, I think, and it’s despicably low. I have strong double digit CTR with AdSense and low single digit CTR with Chitika on the same page. In fact, if CTR drops on Chitika, it’s going to start looking like most affiliate programs I’ve attempted to promote: no profit for my efforts.

Your experience sounds good, but you have something to gain by saying nice things and promoting their referral program, which seems out of character for you, based on what I’ve been reading for months…but it’s important not to state generalizations that are not true.