Chitika Publishers Furious Over Revenue Audit That Has Taken Up To 90% Of Their Revenue

Chitika implemented a revenue audit to invalidate clicks it calls "curiosity clicks" that I mentioned here on Nov 17,2005. Unfortunately for some publishers -- and most it seems -- upon checking their month ending stats some have seen upwards of 90%(!) of their revenue invalidated. Hock over at Marketing Tools Review saw a personal reduction in revenue of 26.3%.

This has set the web ablaze with angry publishers and is sure to put a serious black mark on Chitika's reputation for as long as it exists. Chitika was generally seen as the "AdSense Killer" by a lot of publishers with glowing reviews of how much money people were making. Now it seems they are receiving their full fury.

Eric Giguere of An AdSense Blog says that he has warned of this all along and that Chitika's end of month auditing was just setting itself up for backlash from the very beginning.

Jensense notes that no one has even been paid!

Also, I have not heard of any publisher being paid yet. And since most publishers receive payments via PayPal and on net 30 terms, publishers should have been receiving PayPal payments already. So one also has to wonder if there is a delay in getting those audited earnings to customers.

ShoeMoney asks if ProBlogger has been in on this from the start since they were pushing it so hard. Were they paid endorsers?

SitePoint is full of comments like this one:

HOLLY!!! FSKNDFJNw38u4h793h42bH@G#!!

I haven't been ripped off this bad since that one time when I bought a Dreamcast.

Wow, I got 70%~ cut, I thought earned close to 549$ last month, ending giving me like 80$. Chitika SUCKS!

Chitika is a damn SCAM!! What a waste of advertisement time...I have been screwed again!

Another example at the DigitalPoint forum on the drastic reduction:

Boy, if this is correct, I think there's something wrong.

Before Audit
2005-10-22 22525 44 clicks $28.02

After Audit
2005-10-22 22525 4 clicks $3.05

A couple new blogs have popped up called Shitika and Chitika Sucks. If that doesn't say it all I don't know what does.

Jack Of All Blogs give Chitika it's first Fuckr of the Week award.

Net Dragger lost over 40%

I did the math and figured out we lost over 40% of our October earnings to audited revenue figures.

Voip & Gadgets Blog

I did just check and I'm seeing about a 30% drop from unaudited to audited revenue. It would appear that Chitika is "cheating" the bloggers or there is a vast click-fraud cheating conspiracy on the Chitika network.

Adam Hagans of Performancing is actually giving them a shot at recovering from this fiasco.

Getting an ad network up and running (with sustainable growth) is a monumental task, and it doesn't surprise me that eMiniMalls is having issues. Even with these issues, they've come a lot farther than any other recent second tier ad network, and for that, I commend them. My question is, will they do what they need to do to work these things out and become a major player?

I personally think they're doomed. There's not too many companies that can screw over the heart of their business and get a second chance. If it was a mistake that was corrected, maybe, but this doesn't appear to be a mistake and seems to be their standard operating procedure.

Now I'm kind of glad my application was rejected by Chitika.

Others commenting as well:
Home Office Voice
Jason Golod

This entry is in the following archive(s):
Chitika eMiniMalls Archive

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