Judgment day is at hand for Chitika

Yes, it's almost “C-day”, judgment day for Chitika. In a posting made on the very last day of 2005 and widely reported elsewhere, the folks at Chitika indicated that audited earnings for November and December would be available by January 15, which is next Sunday, with payments to follow thereafter. This move angered the eMiniMalls community yet again, since many Chitika publishers were expecting payment for November's earnings by the end of December.

Like many Chitika publishers, I'm very curious to see how the earnings will pan out this time. I've been getting some good numbers lately from the Invisible Fence Guide and from a couple of my referrals (Chitika's free to join, so if you want to join please go ahead and use this referral link) and I'm wondering how real those numbers are. Chitika's been doing a lot of tweaking to its systems lately. The earnings numbers for the previous day are available much more quickly now, for example.

The way I see it, this is probably the make-or-break point for Chitika in the mind of many publishers. Most, if not all, of Chitika's customers are also AdSense or YPN publishers who don't hesitate to measure the relative success of each program against the other. Initially, those measurements were very favorable to Chitika, but the honeymoon wore off rather quickly when Chitika aggressively audited the earnings numbers they were reporting and made changes to combat excessive clicking by the “curious”. This is their big chance to redeem themselves within the content monetization community. Let's hope they hit a home run with this one and that future glitches are few and far between.

Aside: In a previous posting I mentioned a couple of variants of “Chitika” that clever people had come up with, but I had some questions from non-English speakers about how they're pronounced. To understand why “Cheatika” and “Shitika” are funny, look at them this way: “cheat-ika” and “shit-ika”. I'll leave it to you to look up the definitions of the root words. (No, these are not my inventions. But they are funny.)

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization.

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