The benefit to publishers is that there is increased advertisers in the system and increased advertisers will lead to increased performance as there will be more products to choose from (higher relevancy and therefore CTR) and hopefully a bit more bidding between advertisers which might lead to higher click prices….

I could be interpreting the deal wrong, but it just sounds like Chitika was forced to brand the ads to be able to sign the deal with CNET to grab more ads.

IMO, the branding is a small price to pay if we are getting more products to choose from and potentially higher paying ads. Also, the rep just said the reviews can be toggled off. I’d like to see us getting paid if the review is clicked on, maybe even if it was just a little less money than clicking on the product itself.

Quick clarifications:

We just completed integrating CNET feeds and started testing out the new feeds along with the current merchant feeds in our network.

How will publishers benefit from this?
As always we are constantly working on increasing the number of relationships with merchant partners and merchant feed aggregators, bringing on board additional merchant feeds, so that we will be able to offer a larger choice of paid product listings to our eMiniMalls clients. So basically with additional feeds the system will be able to search a larger base of paid listings to find deals and listings with the best CPCs..leading to higher revenues for the publisher client.

The co-branded unit will show up only when the backend system selects the merchant listings from CNET for a given keyword/product.

Option to turn on/off the reviews tabs?
Yes. We will be introducing the option to activate or de-activate the reviews tabs. As always, we are planning on giving the full “freedom of choice” to our publishers.

btw, the reviews tab will show up when there is a review for the selected product. Also, on some of the smaller units, due to space constraints the reviews tab might not show up.