With the holidays fast approaching I thought I’d end this week’s poll of the week a couple of days early.
The question this week asked how much readers earned from Chitika’s eMiniMalls. in October after auditing.
The results (shown graphically below) illustrate very clearly that Chitika has a way to go when it comes to getting bloggers to sign up with almost exactly half of the 433 who responded indicating that they do not use Chitika eMiniMalls on their blogs or websites.
The breakdown of the results was as follows.
What’s interesting is to compare the spread of earnings to the recent Adsense poll we ran (although i’ll note comparing the two ad systems is probably not really fair on either system as they are at such different stages of development – it’s also not fair because I was asking about two different months – so keep all this in mind and don’t take the results too seriously). Keeping all this in mind here are a few reflections on the comparisons:
- Obviously many more people responded to the AdSense Poll – this is probably for a number of reasons including the fact that this poll happened in the week before Christmas, that AdSense has a much higher profile than Chitiika etc
- The Category of people who answered ‘Don’t use’ is clearly much larger when it comes to Chitika – this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest as Chitika is much younger and less known.
- What interested me most was the comparison between the AdSense Poll and the Chitika Poll after taking out the ‘Don’t Use’ figures. ie what I wanted to find out was not only how many don’t use the programs but more so – how are those who are using the programs finding the results. The direct comparisons (taking out the ‘don’t use’ results) look like this:
Once again we see that a fairly high percentage of Chitika publishers are earning under $10 per month. Again due to the age of Chitika and some of the issues they’ve had recently with getting their system balanced with audits this does not surprise me.
Having said this – what interests me most is the top end of the earnings spectrum where we see that in the top brackets Chitika matches and even outperforms AdSense in terms of percentages. 8% of those responding earn more than $10,000 per month with Chitika in comparison to 5% of AdSense publishers.
Once again this comparison is not overly fair as the numbers responding to the surveys were not even and they were surveys of different months. As I always write, these surveys are not scientific by any means and need to be taken lightly – however they do paint an interesting picture.
While Chitika have had a lot of negative press for some of their issues (and I think the stories need to be told to give an honest appraisal of the system) it’s also worth noting that some publishers are making decent money with the system.
What will be interesting is to do this same poll in 12 months time to see how the figures have changed once Chitika has become a little more mature as an Ad system.
Overall the statistics look incredibly evenly matched, but as always with this type of analysis, there are more questions than answers.
It would be interesting to see whether those reporting $10k+ earnings are running adsense, and if they are running both chitika and adsense on the same page and/or running one adtype on alternate pages.
For any site grossing $10k I would have to assume they are already a big player in the market, earning substantial sums from other income streams. Therefore, has the chitika income suplemented or replaced other income?
Like I say, more questions than answers, but if the numbers are accurate (again, I’d be inclined to discount 20-25% of the $10k bracket as being dreamers, in a similar fashion to the adsense poll a few weeks ago) then it shows that even a young scheme such as chitika can earn you a high income quickly, if you have the right type of site, with the right kind of products being marketed.
Good comments David.
I’ll reinforce once again as I did in the AdSense poll wrap up post – that one needs to look at some of the big numbers being talked about here and put them into context.
While it’s easy just to see ‘$10,000 per month’ remember that it’s only a small number of bloggers who are at this level and that behind the stat is usually years of hard work.
I don’t want to put a dampner on people but it’s good to remember.
In terms of your questions – they are definately good ones. I can only answer for myself and a couple of other Chitika publishers that I know are earning good dollars. In all three cases (all above $10,000 per month) there is a combination of Chitika and AdSense ads on the blogs. In my case the Chitika earnigns have become the biggest earner, in the two other cases the earnings are very similar between AdSense and Chitika.
Right now I’ll settle for $2000 a month! $10,000 can wait a bit..
Well, yesterday I served over 200k Chitika impressions and earned less than $15, so I’d love to know how many impressions those $10k earners are serving a month, if they’re telling the truth.
Great post! I took part in the poll (my earnings have been less than $10). I blogged about your post today. My earnings on Chitika are less than 1/20th of my earnings on Yahoo Publisher Network but I reall love the concept and I think eventually it will do well so I am sticking it out. Although, I am not sure if I will include it in some of my new sites.
Could part of the problem with lack of earnings be associated with the way the ads make money? Perhaps people have not dedicated enough time to optimizing the ads in terms of location & style but also in tems of the product keywords (which drives the CTR and subsequent earnings).
Darren, I would assume that knowing some of the types of blog you run, the types of products currently being advertisied via chitika is the main key to your chitika income.
Having looked around the web at the types of sites that appear to be doing well with chitika, they are big on page impressions, covering mostly technology sectors, and generally in the consumer review arena.
If you are getting the throughput of visitors that these types of blogs attract – search engine visitors keen for information prior to purchasing a product – I believe you are likely to fall into a higher income bracket from minimalls than someone blogging about, say, Alaskan weather.
It will be interesting to see if the minimalls look ages well – will it still attract people curious about how the ad itself works in 12 months time, or will it become another format for the consumer to be blind to.
I know you will be unwilling to divulge exact details about the referral program, but can we assume that a reasonable proportion of your chitika income is from the referral program? And does it compare to the adsense referrals program/income?
jack,
I’ve also served large numbers of chitika impressions and earned virtually nothing.
I actually think that impression numbers are important but not the most important factor for Chitika. I guess one does need a good amount of traffic with every ad system – but for me it’s more about ad positioning, choice of keywords but also topic.
As someone above mentions – it is often technology blogs that are doing good with chitikia – but I would actually say from talking to a few different publishers that its wider than tech blogs. I’d say it’s product blogs. I can’t reveal what people have told me but I know of a number of completely non tech/gadget blogs that do reasonably well with chitika.
As I always say though – it doesn’t seem to work on every blog/topic (nor does Adsense) and bloggers need to be willing to experiment with a variety of different income streams to find which works best for them.
An interesting poll would be “How many of you made more than $10,000 before the audit and after the audit got only $10?”
I’m not sure why but your design here has a flaw somewhere.
Everything, starting with the graph, appears at the bottom of your post to the right of the bottom of your left navbar. I’ve noticed this on a few posts recently. I’m using IE6 (yeah, yeah, use firefox whatever, but I’m sure the other 50-80% of your audience could possibly be seeing the same thing)
It’s like “The breakdown of the results was as follows” then huge whitespace all the way down to the bottom of the left nav and then the content appears on the right below that.
This probably won’t come out formatted right in the comments (a preview would be nice), but :
#C
#
C
C
#=navbar
C=Content
It would be interesting to see if Chitika or Google would respond to say how representative these figures actually are.
Chitika is certainly helping advance PPC as a whole. The competition is very healthly for the industry.
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“What will be interesting is to do this same poll in 12 months time to see how the figures have changed once Chitika has become a little more mature as an Ad system.”
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Well said, it will be very interesting to see how these systems advance over the next year. Especially with all of the new competition that is just on the horizon.
Darren you might want to make your graph a little less wide to stop the content being pushed under your sidebar.
PS That above comment isn’t by me (check the IP addresses). The new generation of comment spam grabs legit commenter info and slaps on a spammy comment body.
have deleted it. thanks Rachel
Did you compare blogger’s performance with Yahoo Publisher network?
Nidhi