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.
