Banner ads just seem to get deader and deader every day. A young upstart company called “Chitika” has just supplied the eulogy and a few sharp coffin nails to the once hot banner ads of the 1990’s. Chitika goes far beyond the static banner ad concept and into the world of contextual advertising made popular by the Google AdSense program introduced in 2003. The antithesis of the pop-up ad, contextual advertising from Chitika targets the content of the page on which the ad is placed, then displays advertising relevant to that page’s topic.

Who is Chitika :

The sexy sounding name Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) has nothing to do with bananas. Chitika was created by Venkat Kolluri (formerly of Upromise) and Alden DoRosario (formerly with Terra Lycos). The company appeared out of nowwhere in May 2003 to become a leading player in the emerging industry of contextual advertising. Chitika announced the release of eMiniMalls in June of 2005.

Chitika is a relatively new company that offers an affiliate program for their eMiniMalls product. If you haven’t seen it, eMiniMalls uses some slick Javascript code to very easily embed product related reviews, shopping links and more into your web site. Chitika currently is paying 60% of overall revenue your site generates, on a pay-per-click basis. Webmasters have reported very HIGH CPM returns with the Chitika product in many case.

The minimum payout rate is only $10 and payments are sent via Check or PayPal. Payouts this low are rare! With Google AdSense the minimum payout is $100.

The important thing to remember with these figures is that the ad unit is in a poor position (albeit equally poor to the Adsense unit that outperformed it) and to really get good results you need to use a more obvious/invasive placement.

PAY PER CLICK PROGRAM :
Chitika turned out to be better than my expectations. Initially, I expected it to be like the other ordinary CPC programs like Bidclix, Clicksor etc which paid fewww cents a click (something like $0.10 max). After implementing them and checking out the first day stats, I was amazed.

Chitika, by default, uses manual targeting of products to your pages. For each page, you can enter a keyword, or series of keywords, that match the products you would like to promote, and Chitika will show the best matches. Since the ads are manually targeted by default, the program is in compliance with Google’s Terms & Conditions for AdSense, and makes an excellent compliment to that program. Chitika does offer an contextual matching option if you are not running AdSense and prefer it. You will need to contact them after joining the program to enable this however.

PROS :
Good Support
You can create channels for tracking diffrent pages seperately.
NET 30 Payment Terms

CONS :
Low CTR ( Cost per click )

PAYMENT TERM :
NET 30

PAYMENT METHOD :
Primary : PayPal
Secondary : Check

PUBLISHER CRITERIA :
Anyone who complies with the standard can join

AD NETWORK CONTACT DETAILS :
Chitika, Inc.
Suite 210, Mount Royal Office Park
2 Mount Royal Avenue
Marlborough, MA 01752
USA

T 508.460.0077
F 360.365.9337
E-mail: info@chitika.com

RECOMMENDATION :

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

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