Chitika Archive

I just received the email below from Yahoo regarding their Yahoo Publisher Network which they have announced will be closing in a month — April 30, 2010 to be exact. The Yahoo Publisher Network was supposed to be just like Google’s AdSense product.

I tried the Yahoo Publisher Network on all of my sites but eventually moved it to only one slot on HTMLCenter. The results were so poor that it almost made sense not to run any ads at all over running the Yahoo Publisher Network. It would be great if Yahoo would provide an overview of why they were never able to get good paying quality ads for their publishers as it might help other ad networks with their fill rates and CPM offerings.

If you are running Yahoo Publisher Network code, you must remove it by April 30, 2010 or nothing will be displayed in the ad slot. Interestingly Yahoo is pushing their publishers to Chitika for search ads. Robin from Techcrunch wonders why Yahoo didn’t push publishers to Microsoft’s ad platform considering their search deal. Perhaps Chitika paid for the promotion? No idea, but Robin’s question is a good one.

There’s no note on the Yahoo Publisher Network website regarding the closure and it appears you can still apply for the program as of the time of this post.

Continue reading “There Goes Another One…Yahoo Publisher Network to Close” »

b5media and Chitika have announced a partnership today that will bring Chitika’s advertising program to the 350+ blogs that are in the b5media blog network. This is a huge distribution deal for Chitika. Financial terms of the deal were not provided.

On one of the private advertising forums I am a part of, we’ve been discussing Chitika a lot recently. Chitika has been spamming marketing to many of the larger blogs and Web sites with the following pitch:

I would like to speak to the person that manages online advertising for xyz.com. Chitika provides a service that automatically matches highly relevant and targeted ads with web site content. Through our *Premium* program publishers like you are earning as much as $31.00 eCPM rates.

You can read about our *Premium* program at X. Please let me know who I should contact. Thanks.

Jeff Sable, Vice President – Chitika

The feedback so far has been that Chitika is sending the same email to everyone with the $31/CPM rates even in very different industries. One of the sites signed up with Chitika after reading this email and two months in, is earning 10 cent CPM rates. Another reported making pennies a day even with decent traffic. Are you using Chitika – if so, please report in with your findings. Perhaps Chitika can share who is making $31 cpm rates with their service.

In April 2007, Chitika put together "30 days 30 experts" which focused on tips for "empowering the blogger." Chitika was kind enough to include me in their 30 experts list. (I think they meant the other Allen Stern but mums the word!).

They have put together an eBook with all of the tips from the bloggers. Grab the eBook or check out the actual web pages on the Chitika blog. The eBook is perfect for printing and reading on the subway.

There are some really big names in the blog space including: Neil Patel talking about Delicious, Jeremy Wright discussing b5media and the startup challenges and other posts from Aaron Wall, Darren Rowse, Liz Strauss, and many more.

My article, "Create.Promote.Track.Optimize" is about the lifecycle and how it never ends.