Chitika Anyone?

[Clara]

Anyone monetizing with Chitika? They've contacted me twice about joining, and I'm considering it. I believe they pay per click? Would like to hear about people's experience with it.

[Jack Humphrey]

I just saw them as a massive takeover of my blog, linking any kind of word that their advertisers buy from them, and massively cluttering everything with those popups when you hover over the words.

All it did was get in the way of my message and make my blog look ugly and unprofessional. All for a couple pennies here and there.

I hate those ad networks, can you tell?

[Clara]

Thanks, that's why I was hesitating :)

[Alden DoRosario]

Hey Jack, you got it completely wrong dude. What you are talking about is our Linx product which are the inline links (similar to Vibrant Media and Kontera).

The message that Clara got is probably about our new Chitika | Premium which is growing like crazy. To give you some idea -- we now do about 300M human-entered queries a month -- roughly the size of ask.com. By December, this is expected to be around 1B+ queries a month -- roughly the size of Microsoft. The reason it is growing is: It is working out for the publishers -- AND it does not piss of the users. In fact, the ad unit shows up ONLY when its extremely well targeted to the user's search engine queries.

[Alden DoRosario]

Update: When I replied on August 5th, I mentioned that we were doing 300M queries a month. In September, we did around 530M. I promised that we would be crossing Microsoft soon (they do around 1B a month). That promise is right on track ..