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Chitika just completed the audit of October revenue and publishers are quite upset. Jensense reports that many publishers saw their earnings reduced by half, or more in some cases. Chitika, which was surrounded by positive buzz early on has had a rough couple of weeks. In addition to the audit uproar, publishers were already frustrated when Chitika changed the ad layout to reduce “curiosity clicks.”

Unfortunately I can’t report on how I was effected by the audit. I only implemented eMinimalls on the last day of the October (and didn’t have any clicks that day). While I was quite happy with Chitika’s performance early on, I’ve become discouraged - at least on my Tiger site. In addition to the reduction in clicks due to the ad layout changes, I’ve already mentioned that I was having trouble with finding suitable products. While the relevancy issue has improved slightly, the clicks and earnings per click already had me discouraged and the auditing news doesn’t help.

I imagine I’ll give it another month and see what happens. Darren Rowse spoke with a Chitika representative who explained the reasons for the auditing, and a large component was for ads clicked from invalid countries. Most sports bloggers should make out okay in this respect as I’d imagine most readers are from North America.

I’d be interested to hear of others’ experiences with eMiniMalls. I haven’t seen it implemented on too many sports sites yet, and those that I’ve seen it on seem to be fairly recent. If anybody has been running Chitika for several months and has audit information feel free to comment.

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written by Bill Ferris