Good news for those of you who have been waiting for the Chitika eMiniMalls (aff link) referral program to go public – today it went live.
Now if you refer a new publisher you stand to make 10% of their audited earnings for the first 12 months of their use of eMiniMalls.
I’ve been using the affiliate program for a couple of weeks now and it’s been working out quite nicely.
To be a part of the affiliate program you need to sign up yourself as a publisher and you’ll automatically become a part of it and get your own referral statistics.
The only downside of it is there is no second tier referral program – but beggers can’t be choosers.
Thanks to all of the readers here who have signed up via my affiliate links. I know many of you have gone out of your way to do so as a way of showing your support to ProBlogger.net. I hope that you find them to be as helpful a tool as I have – don’t forget to check out the eMiniMall Tips post I wrote last week which I’m hearing has helped a few Chitika publishers double their income.
On a related side note – I’m seriously considering naming my firstborn after Chitika (Chitika Rowse?) with the earnings they’ve been helping me achieve this week. Even without the referral earnings it’s consistently doubling Adsense revenue and with the holiday season coming the mind boggles at where it could all end up mid December.
I have to say I’m a bit disappointed by the 12 month limit to it.
Surely it would be in their best interests for publishers to have ongoing incentive to help those that they refer to increase their incomes? I can just see what will happen, in 12 months Darren will stop teaching us how to get the most out of eMiniMalls because it won’t be in his best interests to keep helping those of us who signed up.
I also don’t see any way of telling who you have referred which would be very useful information as it would give us incentive to help those who we refer.
I think this affiliate program looks like it has been rushed through without thinking about it. I’ve seen other programs that are ongoing (life long) and give publishers details of who they sign up which have been brilliant not only for the affiliates participating but also the programs as they’ve created a community of publishers that become obsessed evangelists for the programs.
This will work well for Chitika, but only for 12 months. You’ll see lots of talk about it and many publishers using it until the 12 months ticks over and then many will jump off the bandwagon.
I thought Chitika were going to be a ‘new media’ program but it seems that they are unwilling to do anything radical here which is short sighted.
I was also surprised by the 12 month limit, but they are just starting out, so that may change.
Besides, who knows what is going to happen 12 months down the line?
I also think that you are being unkind to Darren, because he doesn’t have to teach us anything.
Sometimes, he benefits from sharing his knowledge and sometimes he doesn’t.
It is nice to help people for FREE and not expect anything in return.
One of my clients thought that I charged people to go on my web site, because he didn’t understand why a consultant would offer advice for FREE.
That amused me quite a bit to be honest.
Not everything is about money and giving good advice often opens doors and leads to new opportunities.
I think the 12 month limit is a sound business decision. To often people promise the world and can not deliver or go broke trying to deliver.
Wow, I had a different reaction to this than the first two people to write comments. I thought the deal was quite generous and more than I expected..
My first reaction was… Holy crap! Darren’s gonna make a mint over the next year. Their plan actually sounds quite generous, and I think it’s a good business decision, as it will keep people like Darren working hard to keep driving new signups, otherwise the referral earnings will dry up.
Darren,
A quick query: Do I only get 90% of my earnings for 12 months? Or do Chitika pay you 10% of my revenue on top of what they pay me? In other words, would I have been better paid if I registered with Chitika independantly?
By the way, I’m not worried by this as my earnings are pretty small, but I think it’s an important point to sort out.
The 10% is paid out of Chitika’s share – you get everything of the audited revenue as it appears on your stats.
But (arguably) if they didn’t run this program, they could take a smaller cut and still clear just as much, so the publisher would get a bigger slice.
true, or maybe Chitika would take a bigger cut.
What I think is hilarious is the rush of posts I’ve just seen today on Chitika from about 20 different bloggers who are now plugging the hell out of the product.
Sadly most are not disclosing that it’s an affiliate product that they are linking to and interestingly some of them are referring to Darren’s record earnings and review but are not linking to him.
Once again we see people’s true motivations coming to the forefront.
On the 12 month thing, I know why Chitika are doing it but agree that it is short sighted and think other ad programs will probably offer longer term affiliate programs in the future and take a longer term view of things.
10% of referral revenue for a year is an incredibly generous cut if you’re in a position to refer quite a few solid sites to Chitika. I think Darren will do very well from this (as he should).
It’s a win-win-win situation: We get increased revenue from the new mini-mall ads, Chitika makes some money, and Darren gets paid (from Chitika’s share) for taking the time to introduce us to the program. I wish more programs were as generous.
I’ve been very interested to read the reactions here so far. I’ve chatted a bit with Chitika about the affiliate program and have given them my two cents worth. My feelings include:
– 10% was more than I was expecting and pretty generous
– 12 months is ok – of course I would have preferred something ongoing. Perhaps 10% in the first year and less in an ongoing way?
– Knowing who I have referred would be nice as I’d love to offer personalised tips – however there are privacy issues around this and so it’s difficult for them to negotiate
– A second tier program would have been nice (ie where publisher A refers publisher B who refers publisher C and A gets a smaller % for referring a referrer). Of course this would be hard to administer and is getting a bit greedy
Remember that I’m arguing from the position of a publisher here so my opinion will of course be biased towards what publishers ‘get’. Chitika have decided (with some consultation from bloggers) what they have decided and now I think we should get on with the job of making the most out of it. Complaining doesn’t really help anyone. We can argue – but the fact is that 12 months of referrals is better than none – I know I’m going to make the most of them.
I tried Chitka (with your referal code, of course!) and was disappointed: the chitka results were small and my adsense numbers also fell. Removed chitka and adsense rebounded.
Then a couple days ago chitka sent out a tips email and in reading it I realized that I’d totally missed the part of customizing the ads to my sites topics: duh! Now the ads are much closer to being on-topic and the numbers are somewhat better.
Still, since putting chitka back on the pages (it’s not as prominent as adsense) the adsense numbers have gone down by 50%. Could it be that there’s a finite click audience and half of the clicks are now going to chitka?
I need to test over a longer period and see if this is just a coincidence.
-Jerry
http://www.evconvert.com/
Yes thanks for the information I signed up hope it works also.Thank You
it’s nice to follow your recommendation on chitika, hoping to make some money too or should I say make the kind of money you make when I grow up like you
it’s nice to follow your recommendation on chitika, hoping to make some money too or should I say make the kind of money you make when I grow up like you.
Darren, have you received a check from them yet? Are they a well-financed organization? Not implying otherwise, but I’m just wondering because of an experience with an ad agency/brokerage IRL whose generous deals were apparently too generous — they ultimately stiffed a lot of publishers and resellers on revenues.
Thanks for your excellent pro-blogging advice, as usual!
Liliha – I got a paypal payment for the first month I was in the program – they seem to be paying fine. I’ve not heard of any publisher big or small who didn’t get paid out.
Hey Darren,
Is there are concern about the bit in the T&C that says that website owners will attempt to stop bots and such from generating page views and click throughs?
Not sure I quite understand the implications of such a statement.
Thanks as always,
Mark
i think its pretty standard – they are just saying that we as publishers will do our best to prevent click fraud from my reading of it.
sure, but are we obliged to actually do anything? ;-)
you’re obliged to try stop it happening I guess.
I guess its in there to stop people trying to rip off the system
[…] Chitika is still very new and my guess is that over the coming months a lot of other products will be added. Problogger has an excellent review about the Chitika eMiniMalls ad services. […]
Thanks as always
I’ve just signed up today.