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All I even have to mention is WOW. I haven’t seen this type of vitriol since the last Democratic Convention, and every one directed toward Chitika, a startup ad company that was alleged to be the Google killer. Their crime? Cutting people’s revenue checks after they’ve earned the cash . Not an excellent PR move. And it's like there are more problems with what, on the surface, seems like an excellent idea. I even have to admit I don’t understand how anyone (including Chitika) makes any money with their revenue model.
Darren Rouse of problogger.net, who I respect immensely (and who makes a few hundred grand a year blogging), has really flogged the heck out of Chitika. Right from the beginning I had trouble understanding how they were getting to make any money.
Chitika Mini Malls allow you to sell specific products (merchandise) within the pages of your website or blog. The ads boast the simplest price for a selected product, then allow the user to click to (supposedly) buy the merchandise . They also include tabs for search and other functionality built right into the banner-like ad.
Publishers can prefer to show ads by keyword (they pick the words), or by page context like Google (having both ads in contextual mode on your site violates Google’s terms of service).
Apparently Chitika has deals with companies like Shopping.com, Ubid et al. to share in clickthroughs. Or they'll just undergo channeladvisor.com, a syndicator of content for the main shopping sites (which explains why all of them have an equivalent content).
From my comfortable chair I can see where the difficulty begins. When someone involves Shopping.com they’re trying to find something, whether it's duck boots from L.L. Bean or A battery charger from Sears, and they’re trying to find the simplest price, presumably in order that they can purchase the merchandise (it’s not called just looking around.com. It’s shopping.com.
So Bean or Sears doesn’t mind paying Shopping.com fifteen cents or 1 / 4 or whatever to urge the person to press the buy button, because they know the person is prepared to place down the mastercard number.
I’m unsure moving that model bent my internet site goes to pay off during a pay-per-click model. Back once we did CASIE-award winning (5 awards actually) campaigns for John Hancock, the goal was to capture someone having a selected life event like having a baby, marriage, graduation, etc., and obtain them to Hancock. The presumption was that they might be able to buy. likelihood is that if they saw a banner that said able to tie the knot? Are you covered? or some such thing and that they clicked, they were able to buy, and it might are worth paying for the press .
Shopping.com is analogous . If you’re there, the life event may be a new TV (not quite as profound as marriage, but important just the same).
I’m unsure what proportion a click on the simplest price for a TV MiniMall ad by someone who isn't able to buy a TV is really worth. Remember, they haven’t come to Shopping.com. Shopping.com has come to them.
Keeping that in mind (the value of a click from my site vs. the worth of a click from the Shopping.com site), all of the controversy makes perfect sense.
Let’s start with the auditing fiasco. They told a bunch of publishers what proportion oney they made up of people clicking on the ads, then decided to require back a number of it. They claimed to be taking back money from clicks from countries where the products couldn’t be shipped and accounting for click fraud. While this is often annoying, I can know it , though I’m almost sure how they might examine every click and figure these things out, especially when rumor has it the system isn’t exactly a technological powerhouse. In fact, consistent with Shoemoney.com, the technology may be a PHP ripoff.
So they threw out a couple of clicks, right. Big deal. But here’s where Chitika crossed the Rubicon as far as I’m concerned — they decided that they were getting to filter what they called curiosity clicks, which they loosely defined as clicks that aren't likely to end in a purchase .
Wait a moment here…no one said anything about sales. As I mention in my previous article about Pay-per-click advertising, the publishers responsibility within the pay-per-click model is to urge the user to click. the remainder of the chain is then out of the publisher’s hands.
Chitika has basically created its own model here, and that i call it Pay-per-selected-click. They are, in effect, deciding that some clicks are more valuable than others. Specifically they're saying that clicks leading to sales are better than clicks not leading to sales. Viola! they need invented Pay-per-Sale (or Pay-per-Action for those semanticists within the audience).
Other people call it BS. Actually so do I. i feel it's dishonest to inform publishers that you simply can pay them for each click then decide which clicks to buy . That’s like telling the lottery agent that you’ll buy the tickets now for $1 each, but you’re returning after the drawing to return those that didn’t win for your dollar back.
Put differently , if you’re making a gift of 70% of what you earn (60% to the publisher and 10% to his referring publishers), you can’t be throwing around dollar bills. And if your model is stupid (which this one clearly is), you would like to tug some hocus-pocus man-behind-the-curtain give-with-one-hand-and-take-away-with-the-other quite magic.
The most amusing a part of this has got to be picturing the design on the marketing weenie’s faces at L.L. Bean and Sears when the bill for 1,000,000 clicks comes in and that they find that they made four sales.
The bottom line here is that during this context (selling someone merchandise) a click from Shopping.com has more value than a click from Bobsblog.com.
Chitika turned me down for an account. They said that I didn’t meet the qualifications. Darren Rouse says that internet sites that are product centered. Chitika says an equivalent thing.
This proves my point even more. If an internet site is product centered (in other words reviews computers or exhalts the virtues of a Palm Pilot), then the very fact that you simply are thereon site means you've got some interest within the product. Your Chitika MiniMall is that the pip out Now for that product. this suggests that there won’t be as many curiosity clicks, and Chitika won’t take the maximum amount of your earnings back.
You are getting subjected to Pay-Per-Action criteria with Pay-Per-Click rewards. If you would like to ascertain how publishers are reacting to the present , you would possibly want to Google Chitika sucks, or search one among the anti-Chitika internet sites like Shitika.com. Jensense also features a nice synopsis you would possibly want to require a glance at.
Without looking I’m getting to guess that the angry people are those furthest from Shopping.com in content and model, and therefore the ones who had the smallest amount began their earnings are more product centered (whatever the hell that means).
Chitika claims to be The Leader in Impulse Merchandising. Their model puts a special spin on the word context. for his or her ads to figure , you've got to be predisposed toward purchasing the merchandise on one among their banners, and therefore the theme of the location on which the ad appears is that the actual context of the ad, not the keywords you supply or context Chitika uses to settle on the banner.
I’d replace Chitika with a Pay-Per-Action ad that matches the theme of your site. If you’re lazy persist with them, a minimum of until they either change the model in order that they make extra money or leave of business. At now I’m unsure which one to back .