14 Jun 09 Chitika hits 50,000 publishers – congrats! a great way to supplement your Adsense & other website revenue methods

I’ve managed website monetization strategies for quite a while now, and first started using Chitika about 3 years ago or so, when they were essentially providing widgets to online stores that would pay a commission. At the time, it was a murky fit if you already had Adsense running, since it involved an option to insert their code to deliver ads in a contextual manner (adjusting ads based on the content of your page)…

At the time they offered 2 types of ad integration for website publishers; either through a fixed keyword method (where you chose a keyword to indicate products to be placed from their pool of advertisers) and a contextual method where they would place ads based on your page content. At the time, Adsense was the biggest (perhaps only significant?) player in the contextual text ad game, so it was hard to really give up the “sure-fire” Adsense revenue to experiment with Chitika. I did try it with the specific keyword method, but their product advertiser range was quite limited – mainly electronics; and as such it didn’t work well with our non-electronics based sites.

That all changed around a year ago, and now they have a great advertising model, where their JavaScript-based ad code only appears to visitors arriving from a search engine. Basically their ad code recognizes the search string that your visitor used on the referring search engine, and then Chitika displays relevant ads based on that particular keyword. It’s not purely contextual, and therefore can be used in tandem with Google Adsense – the latter program specifically disallows for the use of concurrent contextual advertising spots.

This way, it’s only your visitors who arrive from search engines who see the Chitika ads, and you get paid per click that your visitors do on the ads. The payouts are quite decent, and it’s fairly uninstrusive for your visitor base.

Congrats to Chitika who just reached 50,000 publishers! If you own a website, I highly recommend you try out Chitika and get a few extra dollars flowing your way.

Tags: AdSense, Chitika, Monetization, ppc, Web 2.0