I hate to say “I told you so”, but: I told you so, I told you so, I told you so, and I told you so. Yes, the honeymoon with Chitika is off. Why? Because many Chitika publishers are reporting drastic reductions in earnings, often from 40% to 90% less than what they expected, due to Chitika's delayed auditing procedures.
One thing I've always like about AdSense is that its statistics are nearly real-time. If you get invalid clicks, for example, they're usually filtered out of your reports that same day. Sometimes it's not the case: I've had invalid clicks back-posted to my account after a lengthy click fraud investigation, but Google sent me mail to warn me about the values that would be subtracted from my earnings on the next payment. But normally, I don't have any issues and the earnings I see in my AdSense reports is what I'll get by cheque the month after.
But Chitika has a separate auditing step that it runs at the end of each month, not something that runs continuously during the day. The auditing procedure runs through the click data and throws out what Chitika determines to be “invalid clicks”, which according to Chitika's documentation includes clicks from countries like China and India. And maybe they've figured out a way to filter out those “curiosity clicks” that caused them to adjust their eMiniMalls design recently (also to the consternation of their publishers).
The upshot of this is that the earnings figures you see in your Chitika reports may be significantly inflated from what you'll actually get when Chitika sends you a cheque. So all those reports about AdSense publishers leaving Google in favor of Chitika because of the drastically improved earnings they're seeing are surely going to stop. Some are going to switch back to AdSense, some will try Yahoo! Publisher Network, some will look for other programs. The buzz about Chitika will start to settle now that reality has sunk in.
That said, Chitika could fend off some of this criticism by offering more near real-time reporting and doing the auditing on a continual basis. Or even do the auditing on a daily basis instead of a monthly basis. That way publishers wouldn't be so surprised at the end of the month when their earnings plummet after the audit.
Can we all go back now to adding new content to our sites and working on basic search engine optimization?
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!