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December 2, 2005

Chitika Audits Kinda Shitika

I've hung back from experimenting with Chitika, the hip new contextual advertising program, so this info is all second hand, but a lot of people are reporting heavy earnings cuts over the past few days, as Chitica has begun auditing revenue:

Jensense says:

I saw a cut in my earnings from my own ad displays of about 15%. And I lost well over HALF of my referral revenue for the month of October. And since I was running the referral program for nearly all of October (instead of just since the 18th, like most publishers) it isn't just 14 days I saw half my revenue cut but rather it was 26 days of promoting Chitika in October that I lost over half my income on. And I suspect I will see the same for November as well.

SitePoint and DigitalPoint have people reporting cuts of up to 90%.

Andy Hagans is discussing it at Performancing, Jason Golod has a bit, and Shoemoney calls out Darren Rowse for being in bed with Chitika. (Then takes it back after Darren does some damage control, which is cool. They both have highly entertaining blogs if you're interested in contextual advertising).

Apparently, no one has yet been paid for their Chitika earnings, according to Jen. So those of us who hung back either missed out by not getting in on Chitika early, or saved a some time by not bothering. We'll probably know within a few days.

Update: Darren says Chitika is clarifying this issue now on their blog.

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