Chitika, a Telugu (Indian language) word means “Snap of the fingers” was founded in 2004 by Venkat Kolluri and Alden Do Rosario. In order to understand the effectiveness of Chitika, we also need to understand the circumstances, under which Google Adsense does not bring us target revenue. Now most of us are familiar with the key behind the success of Google AdSense. It compares the content of a website with ads and displays relevant ads on the website, which increases Clickthrough ratios (CTR). In this method, both the advertiser and publisher earn easy money. If the ads are not relevant to the site, it will decrease Clickthroughs and eventually render loss to all stakeholders. Unlike, AdSense, Chitika, does not take into consideration the content of the page for displaying relevant ads. Instead, it scans search strings, used to enter the website, which are often more relevant.
Chitika’s Ads Compatibility
Layout of the ad is very important in determining, whether it will be clicked or ignored. Keeping this aspect in view, Chitika allows tremendous scope for optimizing your ads. You can change the title and text colors as well as border and URL colors, to blend it well in line with the general layout of your website. AdSense also allows this leverage, but Chitika excels in another fact that it also publishes relevant images next to your ads, which surely increase Clickthrough ratios, because looking at an image, the user naturally feels like clicking the text next to it. With astounding relevancy of ads, Chitika is competing AdSense extraordinarily in CPC market. According to stats, Chitika’s CTR often exceeds to AdSense by 100%, especially in gaming niches.
Unique Relevancy Method of Chitika
Another big plus for Chitika is that it performs very well with almost all websites. AdSense, whose performance with poor text-content and video sites has not been at par, mainly because AdSense crawler can’t find any content for displaying ads on video sites. They relate the ads with descriptions, tags or comments of videos. However, Chitika just analyses the search string to determine what the user was looking for. Chitika has optimized its services to monetize websites particularly with traffic from U.S. and Canadian search engine.
Chitika Services
Chitika offers following four options, mainly centered on publishers:
- Premium is based on the users’ keyword search. Whenever a user visits your site by putting some keywords in search engines, Chitika displays relevant ads at your site, while blocking other ads from your websites, which increases CTR. The service is however limited to US and Canadian search engines.
- Whitespace uses extra space in users’ high resolution monitors to display relevant ads to your website by removing ad blocks.
- Linx creates in-text links on pay per click (PPC) model.
- The Referral or affiliate program gives you additional 10% of earning generated by publishers, referred to the program by you and another 25% for advertisers.
Get Going with Chitika
Joining and signing up for Chitika is absolutely free. The procedure is much similar to other ads companies. You get a unique HTML code; place it in your website and Chitika starts displaying ads, relevant to your website content.
Chitika Payment Plan
Chitika pays on the 30-Net basis, which means that money earned in a month is made available for payout after 30 days. Chitika uses PayPal and Cheques for payments. The lowest payout threshold for payment through PayPal is 10$ and 50$ through cheque.
Chitika Limitations
Earning money with Chitika mainly depends on the traffic from search engine and CTR. All you can do it is to improve your content and website design, while Chitika caters for optimal placement of relevant ads in your website to garner user’s interest in clicking the ads. Increased and unique traffic in this case is directly proportional to increased income. On the other hand, if you are running a low traffic niche site, Chitika system may fail for you, because though niche sites are ideal for internet, exceedingly focused niches reduce the chances of increased traffic and variety in relevant ads.
Conclusion
Concluding our discussion, we observe that for publishers, PPC model and affiliate program of Chitika brings immense opportunities. The flexibility and vibrant system of Chitika makes it a perfect Google AdSense alternative for most of accomplished websites. However, it looks more specific to USA and Canadian markets. In addition, sites, struggling with low organic traffic are likely to face more difficulties with this system.
