The Chitika honeymoon ends: users starting to talk about dropping service
Unfortunately it seems the honeymoon is over eMiniMalls ad provider Chitika following a lot of bad feedback following their announcement last Wednesday about changes to the way the ads are displayed to reduce ‘€œcuriosity clicks’€?.
Jen at Jensense points to threads on DigitalPoint and WebMasterWorld where Chitika users talk about leaving the program all together. Darren at Problogger is providing advice as to how to increase CTR rates with Chitika to balance any downturn.
Personally I’m not leaving Chitika at this stage, but I have seen a big downturn in revenue, particularly from my affiliate revenue, which is down between 50-75% per day, and its difficult not to be disappointed by the changes. Chitika posts here today that they are still tweaking the interface so hopefully things will pick up again, but if they don’t I can imagine a lot of people dropping the program pretty quickly. I suppose Jen has the best advice: “Compare earnings before the change and after the change, and see if the ad space still monetizes well enough to remain with eMiniMalls or if the ad space could make more money with another ad program.”
I’ve pulled it from two of my blogs, which were getting very few clicks from Chitika, but with the new stunt they are pulling I was getting nothing. They are out until something improves.
I’ve found it’s improved since that one bad day after their changes. They’ve since made a few more changes to their design which helped things pick up for me and from what I can see with quite a few other publishers.
Chitika posted an update on their blog with detailed information on curiosity clicks and recent changes:
http://chitika.com/blog/?p=24
I have never had luck using the eMiniMalls as generic ads, however, when embedded in articles that pertain to specific products they still perform well.
I do much better using Chitika ads for specific products than trying to sell the product itself through affiliate links.
I think this just shows that different ads excel in different contexts and for different niches and that maximizing ROI is going to require experimentation and management. And don’t forget it is always better to have your eggs in a variety of baskets.
hence my article that describes why blogging is a poor business model and quitting your day job to become a “pro blogger” is not a wise choice:
http://gabbr.com/thread.php?id=26
we have seen this happen time and time again…
back in the day doubleclick.net was one of the agencies who gave out tonnes of cash for ads.. webmasters in the late 90s were rolling in it and were quitting their full time jobs to become professional webmasters..
and to make things better webmasters were PAID by impressions!! not by clicks! how sweet was that?
the ad revenues quickly diluted when more and more people caught on to this way of making money
when revenues dilute the pay out to the individual is less.
the same thing is happneing with eMiniMalls
hence, ad revenues are a poor business model
DrDel, it’s a numbers game. Get enough eyeballs in the right markets and you can make millions. I make a healthy living purely off Ad revenues. I kicked the day job a few months ago and haven’t looked back (The site in my profile isn’t my only one).
I’ve seen doubleclick and CJ payouts. And they are pathetic unless you are good at the affiliate model. Contextual advertising has offered a never before opportunity that I’m sorry you’re missing out on.
The eMiniMall hiccup is just that. I don’t care to remember how many we had with Adsense in the early days.