Chitika eMiniMalls Screws Publishers Again!

In a move to further alienate publishers from using their advertising model ever again, Chitika eMiniMalls has broken their own Terms of Service and announced that payments for November will not be ready until mid January. Chitika runs on a net 30 payout according to their Terms of Service which means that payments for November should have arrived by December 30.

In a bout of unprofessionalism they made this announcement a day late and a dollar short (pun intended), posting to their blog just 5 hours and 40 minutes before midnight on New Years Eve, that they won't be making the payments. The post was made a whole day after publishers were already expecting payment from them. No email to publishers, just a backdoor way that later they could say "we announced it". Pathetic.

What else is there to say? The company seems to be a joke. It exploded onto the web capturing a lot of publishers with their "too good to be true" claims and, in a way, defrauding them by showing them "fake" earnings reports through the first months. Then after they had all these publishers crooning over how much money they were making -- and convincing others to join -- Chitika pulled the rug out from under them all just a month ago dropping some publishers earnings by as much as 90%!

Two weeks after that major fiasco, which was a bombshell throughout the online publishing community, I reported on some publishers showing earnings of 0 even though they were running the eMiniMalls in their optimal advertising spaces. I even went as far as to write an entire article for Startup Hints on Chitika and how not to destroy your business.

While some of you out there may not see the impact this has had on publishers, others out there have been affected directly when they displaced major earning spots with this advertising, seeing major results, only to feel ripped off when thousands of promised dollars disappeared into thin air.

I would highly recommend that if you are using them you should think twice. Time after time this company has shown a total disregard to their publishers.

Jensense had this to say:

I believed it was going to be an uphill struggle for Chitika to restore publisher's faith in the eMiniMalls product after the previous auditing issue. However, this new 16 day delay that contravenes their own T&Cs has the distinct ring of a nail being driven into the eMiniMalls coffin. Very disappointing for a program that had so much promise.

I totally agree.

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