Chiquitita, er, Chitika for AdSense Publishers

Despite the resemblance to a famous ABBA song, Chitika is an advertising service that's been gaining a lot of traction among AdSense publishers lately with its “eMiniMalls” program. We've all seen Darren Rowse gush about it, but I had my doubts about the program. Rick Blythe over at feedbuzzard encouraged me to give it a try, however, echoing Darren's happiness with the eMiniMalls results. So I signed up for it using the simple online form. I've been accepted into the program, so now I can start to figure out what all the fuss is about.

Before I continue, though, be aware that eMiniMalls has two modes, a contextual mode and a non-contextual mode. You can't use other contextual advertising services in conjunction with AdSense. Google is very clear about this in the AdSense terms and conditions. So if you want to combine AdSense and eMiniMalls on the same page, you must use the non-contextual mode of eMiniMalls. However, enough people are doing this (I wonder if Chitika was surprised by this situation?) that Chitika's made the non-contextual mode the default for the code it generates.

AdSense publishers will find the eMiniMalls program to be very similar in many ways to the AdSense program. Chitika has terms and conditions and program policies that are very similar to AdSense's. In fact, I found it hard to distinguish the two. Not that they're identical. You can place as many eMiniMalls blocks on your page as you want, for example. Chitika also tells us exactly how it splits the revenue it makes with its members (you get 60% of the revenue). But in general, a site that already complies with the AdSense rules will have no problem complying with Chitika's rules (with the caveat that you should be using non-contextual advertising).

The eMiniMalls management console is much simpler than the AdSense console, because there aren't as many options to choose from. You can select one of several different formats, all of which match up to equivalent AdSense ad unit formats. (The intent is to obviously allow AdSense publishers to replace AdSense ad units with their eMiniMalls equivalents, or at least to use them as alternate ads.) You can change the colors.

One thing that's different is that Chitika lets you modify the JavaScript code. In fact, you have to modify it for the non-contextual mode to work. In non-contextual mode, Chitika can't go and read the web page automatically to find the best keywords. What you end up doing is specifying a set of keywords right in the JavaScript, from which the ads are chosen when the eMiniMalls block is displayed.

There is a downside to eMiniMalls, however, and that's in the breadth of advertising. eMiniMalls is all about selling products. If your site doesn't directly relate to a tangible class of products, you may not have much luck with eMiniMalls. I don't see much use for them on this site, for instance, because it's a site all about AdSense. (Those of you reading this posting live on the site should see a sample ad, though.) I can put them on other sites, however, that are more product-friendly, and see how that goes. Watch for more on this shortly.

Comments are closed.