Avoid Chitika ! – How NOT To Monetize Your Blog

 
I’ll admit that every so often, the running of a website can be a frustrating experience.  This dark side of the biz usually involves money and more specifically, someone else using your hard work to make THEIR money.

For anyone running a website or blog of their own, at some point the topic of monetization crosses your mind.  How do I turn my hard work and my dedication, into money?

If you do a little Google-research, you’ll find that many of the services available to help you monetize your blog are well represented.  In other words there’s no shortage of “advice” telling you which services to join and which services to promote.  Armed with this advice, I set out in 2012 to monetize my website and today’s post is my way of giving back to the blogging community with some honest long-term experience advice…..AVOID CHITIKA!

Based on 3+ years of experience on a high traffic website, I thought I’d share my results.  Your mileage may vary, but I’m here to tell you something you may find shocking. 

Most monetization services are designed to turn your hard work, into THEIR profit, NOT yours.

I started this series by exposing the popular “promotional” service paperblog, in my “Avoid Paperblog” article.  Today I’ll be taking on the online advertising network Chitika, and stay tuned for my article on Commission Junction.

With much recommendation to be found in a simple Google search, I joined Chitika In Oct 2012.  I setup their ad on my site and started tracking results.  When you configure your ad on the Chitika.com website, it looks pretty good (like the graphic below:)

However, when you insert that code into your own website it looks like the ad to the right:  Now take note that my site is about craft beer…not tablet computers, cars or any of the other generic ads that pop up on the Chitika block. [Editors Note]:  At the time of this post the Chitika ad is still up if you want to try it.  I plan to remove it VERY soon. 

I couldn’t help but wonder why the Chitika ads on my site looked so…..so crappy!  So I asked Chitika.

Off goes my e-Mail to Support at Chitika, and about a week later, I received a response from Chitika….simply telling me that the crappy green ad you see to the right is only what I was seeing….and my readers were seeing something much more graphical and much more tailored to their interests.  So I say OK…and we move on; deciding to give them some time and give me some experience with Chitika.

Over the summer in 2015, for the first time in the 8-year history of my site, I started receiving complaints about what I determined to be my Chitika Ad.  After the 4th complaint, I check back in on my Chitika performance (on Chitika.com) to see what’s up.  Of course I find that the ad is still this crappy green thing you see above (despite inserting their new code), so I decide to click on the ad to see what my readers are complaining about.  Much to my surprise I consistently get either this (below):
Or on a good day I get this (below):
Error messages or blank pages came up no matter what I tried.  If you look at the graphic at the very top of this article, you can see that about the time my readers started complaining, my “valid clicks” hit zero after a 13-month downward trend.  So naturally I contacted Chitika Support.

I outlined the problem and even included some of the graphics in this article.  I also visited machines in our public library, machines of co-workers, machines of family members and even public access hotel and conference center machines.  I wanted to see if what Chitika told me was true….that the average person was seeing much better content and much better ads than I was on my own site.

To my surprise, in every case these machines displayed the same crappy Chitika ad and the same blank page or error message when you click!  No wonder no one wants to click on my Chitika ad and no wonder (for the first time ever) people were actually complaining about an ad on my site.

I contact Chitika on Sept 16 2015 and received an automated message with a case number (below):
I’m told that “Chitika” translates to "snap of the fingers."  Unfortunately they weren’t talking about the responsiveness of Chitika support when they picked this name.  After 8 days pass, I receive the following from Chitika Support (below) on 9/24/2015:
If you can’t read the e-Mail, it says:

Hi,
The majority of the time people see this, it’s because they’re clicking their own ads. We advise you not to do this as it is considered click fraud and the clicks will not be counted in your dashboard. If you’d like to see how your ads appear to others, add #chitikatest=keyword to the end of your URL to preview the ads. Ex:www.cellphones.com#chitikatest=smartphones. Remember to refresh the page after adding this to your URL. Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Team Chitika

Yes…Karen from Team Chitika not only ignores the issues with their ads, the error messages and blank pages and tells me the ENTIRE problem is that I’m clicking on my own ads.  As if that’s not enough fun, she accuses me of “click fraud!”  Now keep in mind my Sept and Oct 2015 real or “fraudulent” clicks are ZERO! on the chart above.

To add insult to injury, Karen also includes the helpful smiley-face rating system to the right.

To get such a “crappy” non-answer after waiting over a week was frustrating to say the least so I replied (using the red frowny face) on 9/24/2015.  I told Karen my readers are seeing the same crappy ad and error messages.  I told Karen I had tested the ads & clicks on strange machines, and family machines with the same result.  I asked Karen to look at my performance drop, look at the ad content and look at the error messages and blank pages…and please don’t take another 8 days to reply.

The good news is Chitika Support didn’t take 8 days to reply. 

As I write this article on 15 Oct 2015, Chitika has yet to reply at all.  We’re now 30 days from my original support question with NO reply, NO resolution and NO fix to the errors and blank pages!

In summary, you’ll see that in just 3-years, I cleared 1,078,000 impressions on the Chitika Ad.  Despite their crappy ad and content, I created 1,550 “Valid Clicks” with a monthly high of 138.  In the end I earned $28.84….so a little math will tell you I on 29,957 impressions per month I earned roughly 80-cents a month!

1,078,447 Impressions on The Chitika Ad…..$28.84 earnings in 36-months.

In the end I recommend you Avoid Chitika or at best, carefully monitor their performance, advertising units and advertising links…knowing full well that there is NO viable support if you have a problem. 

I also can’t help but wonder what my earnings would be if a) their ad units looked a lot better, b) their ad units were tailored to the interests of my readers, and c) the links actually worked OR took you to a working web page with content.

Your mileage may vary, but in my experience I can only recommend you Avoid Chitika!

21 Oct 2015 – Still no reply to my support contact.