Chitika Review - Pay Per Click Ads

I tested Chitika, a pay per click (PPC) ads service to help publishers monetize their traffic. I displayed their ads a forum message board and 2 blogs for approximately a week, with very disappointing results. Here's my quick review of Chitika.

$0.07 for 5 clicks? Are you kidding!?

You read it well. What they give you per click is ridiculous. The highest paid click I managed to get was $0.03. I've read similar feedback on quite a few blogs and forums analyzing various ads networks. It would seem that their PPC is very, very low, especially if you're used to Adsense's $0.50 to $3.00 per click. Even with a very high click-through rate, which I had not, it would take you a huge number of clicks to earn anything of interest. 

Basic content targeting, low quality ads

Unless you have obvious words like blog, chatroom, or cars (maybe sex or casino too, didn't try) in your pages, you won't get ads that relate much to your content. The same goes for their Linx product that generates in-text ads. It'll only integrate a very little bit of in-text ad-links, because it's actually unable to provide links for that much keywords in the first place. All in all, the overall quality of their ads is not very good. They definitely don't provide junk ads (Your PC is infected kind of ads) like Adversal and Bidvertiser, but they're still a very long way from Adsense.

Text-only, customizable ads

Having access to text ads only wasn't a problem for me, but I can imagine it can be for some. While they looked quite different than Adsense, their ads are highly customizable, which makes them easy to integrate properly in your website. Don't expect to get something that looks or feels like Adsense here. Chitika's ads are big boxy buttons. 

Support wasn't impressive

I had to contact their support department a few times. On one occasion, I had to wait up to 9 days in order to get an answer from them. Several answers were extremely basic and not very helpful. 

Do they pay?

From what I was able to read on several sites discussing about them, yes, they pay. I can't personally confirm because I gave up after a $0.18 week worth of clicks. That's just me. 

Conclusion

Chitika was a very bad PPC ads network for me. Perhaps a lot of folks are having great success with them and I'm happy for them. I'm also surprised. Even though I believe that I integrated my ads as good as I could, maybe the site I was testing Chitika on wasn't in a niche of content prone to receive their top quality ads.

I don't think Chitika should be considered a replacement for Google Adsense.