Chitika - An Honest Analysis

January 13, 2006 | In Business, Technology |

Okay, so there’s been a lot of talk recently about how much Chitika sucks. On SitePoint, for example, there are several threads like this one, where people get together and talk about how little money they’re making with it, and how what they do make gets “audited” and heavily deducted at the end of every month.

I originally noticed this kind of sentiment about a month ago, just after I started using Chitika, but decided to stick it out and see how well it did for me. And the results… well, they certainly weren’t great, but in general, it did a lot better than I expected.

In total Chitika made me $49.01 in the month of December ($44.46 after audit), with a single 468×60 banner placed at the bottom of each article on TeleClick. That comes out to an eCPM of around $2.

Now that’s nothing compared to the $3x.xx eCPM and $796.47 in earnings that I got from Adsense on that site, but it doesn’t seem to reduce my Adsense revenue at all. And an extra $45/month on my existing traffic (with very conservative placement I might add) certainly doesn’t hurt.

I can see that all those people earning $0.05 eCPM on Chitika, with 75% of their revenue being deducted would want to stop using it — and they should — but that’s not to say it’s completely useless for all websites.

In general, it’s only international clicks that get deducted, the reason that I suffered a 10% loss is that 90% of my traffic comes from the US, Canada, and western Europe. For sites with a high level of international traffic, and no relation to a product niche, I wouldn’t recommend Chitika under any circumstances. For a US-targeted shopping website, however, it would probably perform very well.

So the final verdict? Chitika isn’t as good as Adsense, and probably never will be, but if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s certainly worth giving a shot.

If you’d be interested in obtaining a free Chitika account, and seeing how well it works with your website, please click here.