The beginning of a Chitika backlash?
Rick Blythe of feedbuzzard reports a sharp drop in Chitika earnings since yesterday's redesign of the eMiniMalls units to discourage so-called “curiosity clicks” that were costing advertisers money without leading to increased sales. See Chitika filters out “curiosity clicks” if you missed my posting on this.
It looks like the love affair with Chitika is ending, which is what I expected. It had to happen. It happened with AdSense when Google introduced Smart Pricing to lower the per-click prices paid by advertisers from non-converting sites. It will happen to Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) as well — it's still in beta and limited to US residents, so it's not out of its honeymoon period yet.
All the more reason to make sure you diversify and explore using different forms of content monetization. You can use AdSense and Chitika together, for example, but maybe it makes sense to drop one of them, possibly replacing it with something else. There are no general recommendations I can make, it really depends on your individual sites. But think about it.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
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