AdSense Alternative: Chitika

The Chitika│eMiniMalls site and the concept behind it has long been the proverbial Curate’s egg of online advertising, in that the ads that Chitika serve up look fantastic, they pay pretty well, the concept would seem perfect for niche marketing sites, and the company is well established.

In other words, Chitika are doing, and have for a long time been doing, almost everything right.

And yet, they still do not seem to have hit the mainstream of online advertising in a massive way, and it continues to be something of a mystery why this is so.

Chitika allows you to create a mini shopping mall on your site, populated with products that you can ensure are 100% targeted by using the most appropriate key search words and phrases.

You can choose from a huge range of different ad formats, all of which are highly attractive and, because they are image rich, should be extremely effective.

Furthermore, the mini-malls can be demographically targeted if you live in USA, Canada, Europe, Australia or New Zealand, so it is possible to show local advertising which should massively improve your sites profitability.

Add to this the fact that Chitika offer several other types of ads as well, such as PPC text ads (what Chitika call ‘RPU’) and Linx (which embeds links into the text on your site, like aLinks does for WP blogs) and you have a package that really should be unbeatable.

And no doubt it is (to at least some extent) a popular AdSense Alternative, with over 12000 blogs and websites featuring Chitika and especially their mini-malls.

But, given everything that they have to offer (and the fact that it is free to join) I cannot help but feel that Chitika should be a far more popular choice than they actually are.

Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that Chitika ‘recommend’ that their mini-malls work best with sites that attract at least 10000 visitors per month?

That would certainly deter someone who, for example, wanted to start their own niche targeted site with a store inside of it.

And it does seem a bit pointless telling a site owner that the more visitors they get, the better their store will work!

I would think that this would be pretty obvious to most people!

Anyway, Chitika is definitely worth considering and applying to, even if your site or blog does not reach the minimum ‘recommended’’ visitor levels.