Ads Probably Not Going to Ping Very Loud In The End

Here via here via the aggregator in the WordPress dashboard —

Chitika has been enjoying a lot of buzz around publishers cause they report very very high earnings compared to, say, Adsense. Turns out that those reports might be just a tad exaggerated. Turns out they have a monthly “auditing” process which decimates the earnings they report to you in the monthly reports. Other similar advertisers audit results to remove obvious click spamming, but usually this means a single digit percentage decrease, not the disappearance of the vast bulk of the reported income.

I kinda figured something like that was up, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. Ah well. Might bust it back down to just Adsense.

UPDATE: JenSense points out that she’s never heard of anyone actually receiving money from Chitika, and that they have a little out clause in the contract that says that they don’t have to pay you till their clients pay them. Huh.

Apparently the audit discounts not only obvious click fraud but innocent curiosity clicks — whatever that means.

So Chitika perhaps falls into the “too good to be true” category. We’ll see.