Nidhi

PS That above comment isn’t by me (check the IP addresses). The new generation of comment spam grabs legit commenter info and slaps on a spammy comment body.

Everything, starting with the graph, appears at the bottom of your post to the right of the bottom of your left navbar. I’ve noticed this on a few posts recently. I’m using IE6 (yeah, yeah, use firefox whatever, but I’m sure the other 50-80% of your audience could possibly be seeing the same thing)

It’s like “The breakdown of the results was as follows” then huge whitespace all the way down to the bottom of the left nav and then the content appears on the right below that.

This probably won’t come out formatted right in the comments (a preview would be nice), but :

#C
#
C
C

#=navbar
C=Content

As someone above mentions – it is often technology blogs that are doing good with chitikia – but I would actually say from talking to a few different publishers that its wider than tech blogs. I’d say it’s product blogs. I can’t reveal what people have told me but I know of a number of completely non tech/gadget blogs that do reasonably well with chitika.

As I always say though – it doesn’t seem to work on every blog/topic (nor does Adsense) and bloggers need to be willing to experiment with a variety of different income streams to find which works best for them.

I’ve also served large numbers of chitika impressions and earned virtually nothing.

Having looked around the web at the types of sites that appear to be doing well with chitika, they are big on page impressions, covering mostly technology sectors, and generally in the consumer review arena.

If you are getting the throughput of visitors that these types of blogs attract – search engine visitors keen for information prior to purchasing a product – I believe you are likely to fall into a higher income bracket from minimalls than someone blogging about, say, Alaskan weather.

It will be interesting to see if the minimalls look ages well – will it still attract people curious about how the ad itself works in 12 months time, or will it become another format for the consumer to be blind to.

I know you will be unwilling to divulge exact details about the referral program, but can we assume that a reasonable proportion of your chitika income is from the referral program? And does it compare to the adsense referrals program/income?

Could part of the problem with lack of earnings be associated with the way the ads make money? Perhaps people have not dedicated enough time to optimizing the ads in terms of location & style but also in tems of the product keywords (which drives the CTR and subsequent earnings).

I’ll reinforce once again as I did in the AdSense poll wrap up post – that one needs to look at some of the big numbers being talked about here and put them into context.

While it’s easy just to see ‘$10,000 per month’ remember that it’s only a small number of bloggers who are at this level and that behind the stat is usually years of hard work.

I don’t want to put a dampner on people but it’s good to remember.

In terms of your questions – they are definately good ones. I can only answer for myself and a couple of other Chitika publishers that I know are earning good dollars. In all three cases (all above $10,000 per month) there is a combination of Chitika and AdSense ads on the blogs. In my case the Chitika earnigns have become the biggest earner, in the two other cases the earnings are very similar between AdSense and Chitika.

It would be interesting to see whether those reporting $10k+ earnings are running adsense, and if they are running both chitika and adsense on the same page and/or running one adtype on alternate pages.

For any site grossing $10k I would have to assume they are already a big player in the market, earning substantial sums from other income streams. Therefore, has the chitika income suplemented or replaced other income?

Like I say, more questions than answers, but if the numbers are accurate (again, I’d be inclined to discount 20-25% of the $10k bracket as being dreamers, in a similar fashion to the adsense poll a few weeks ago) then it shows that even a young scheme such as chitika can earn you a high income quickly, if you have the right type of site, with the right kind of products being marketed.