Will eMiniMalls Go The Way Of TiVo -- or Replay?

[Joel Comm]

Did you ever hear of Replay TV? They started up at about the same time as TiVo and did pretty much the same thing: they developed a personal video recorder that stores television shows on a hard drive. Whenever both companies appeared at tech shows, critics would rave about Replay’s technology and turn their noses up at TiVo’s.

Replay died just as TiVo hit the big time.

So if Replay had such a great product, what went wrong? Well, it seems to be the same thing that’s going wrong with Chitika at the moment.

I still think that Chitika have a great product. Their ads look good, they’re fun to mouse over, packed with information and they’re easy for publishers to control. I’ve had some pretty impressive CTRs with them.

Like Replay, there’s nothing wrong with Chitika’s product. But there seems to be plenty wrong with what’s happening on the business end of the company. First there was the audit that slashed everyone’s incomes. That came out of the blue, hit everyone right where it hurt and destroyed much of the trust and enthusiasm that had built up around the company’s eMiniMalls. Now there’s a delay in paying the results of those same slashed November earnings -- and that delay wasn’t announced until after the payments should already have been made.

The people at Chitika are a pretty smart bunch and they went out of their way to make eMiniMalls friendly to publishers. I don’t know how they messed up so badly or who’s responsible for it, but I sure hope they going to get it fixed (although even if they do, I think they’re going to have to work pretty hard to win back people’s trust.)

But I can’t imagine a product as good as eMiniMalls is just going to disappear. I’ve already seen traditional ads designed to look exactly like eMiniMalls on Web pages. They weren’t interactive and they looked too much like ads to be very effective but it’s pretty clear that ads like eMiniMalls can be a great way to generate extra revenue. Users love them.

Even if Chitika don’t get their act together, I’m pretty confident that someone else will. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on Chitika to see if they can solve their problems... but I’m also going to be watching out for other companies to see if they’re going to take advantage of Chitika’s big idea.

[Will.Spencer]

I think that Chitika was just being eaten alive by the inevitable click-fraud that occurs in any CPC model.

It seems for awhile like every fraudster who was kicked out of AdSense just went and joined up with Chitika.

Chitika really needs to sign up more advertisers to survive, and I can't imagine that all of that fraud was helping.

I run Chitika on my sites where they have relevant ads, but that's a small percentage of my sites.

[dragonsage]

We're still waiting on November results -- we've go the daily preliminaries, but not the final audited ones, the ones they pay. I notice that Chitika reminded us that it is a "beta program."

Chitika says they are handling the "displayed and clicked, but not from a country the advertiser specified" problem at the display phase. We get an alternate URL we can display if the country is not one for that advertiser. However, I don't know any way to test that this works.

I do know that my daily results have plummeted. Partly, that's because I've reduced the number of Chitika ads on my sites, but mostly it's something else. Whether the visitors have now trained themselves to ignore them, or whether I'm displaying things they don't want/need (I specify the query strings), I don't know.

The surprise audit chop was on October results. These were revealed on December 1st, the date they paid the October results. One of my biggest issues was not the amount of the drop (about 30% for me), but that there was no word, no hint, that the audit results would be that bad -- so I devoted a lot of prime web space to the Chitika ads!

I expected adjustments for any click fraud found, but I didn't expect any. I did not expect adjustments for displaying ads, getting them clicked on by interested shoppers, and then not getting paid for delivering the shopper. I guess that's what comes with a beta program.

[elitemktr]

I'm just about to launch a huge new content site and was going to fill a lot of pages with Chitika eMiniMalls. But now having heard about this turbulence I'm thinking I should reconsider and revise my approach.

Does anyone who uses Chitika and was effected by all this have any suggestions? If you were launching a new site, would you even use Chitika?

Thank you for your suggestions.

[Will.Spencer]

I still use Chitika, but only to augment AdSense.

AdSense gets the best ad spots, Chitika gets what is left over.