Chitika Network Stats - Sandwiched Between Ask and AOL

August 22nd, 2008

Posted in: Chitika | Premium

Its Friday evening and the big bad boss has left the building. So I get to steal some time for my favorite passtime - data analysis. Here are some stats from across the Chitika network. Hats off to the Chitika publishers ..

Executive Summary:

1. Just crossed the 30,000 mark of approved publishers [This was a huge surprise -- since just a month ago, we were at 26,000]
2. We now serve more sponsored search ads than ask.com making us the “5th Search Engine” [This is of course an estimate. According to Comscore, ask.com serves around 300M. We did about 370M in July. AOL probably did around 790M].
3. The Chitika | Premium network is growing at around 25% month-over-month since April. [If this rate continues, we should be able to cross AOL by around December]

Publisher Growth
A nice suprise in the analysis was that the publisher growth seems to be accelerating since we launched Chitika | Premium in April. Why is this a surprise ? Because usually the summer months are the slowest months — yet the growth is very healthy and strong.

Chitika | Premium Trend
Since April, the number of sponsored search ads (these are the type of ads you see when you type a keyword in google) seems to be growing at a healthy 25% month-over-month clip. That is good news all around here as more and more large publishers are coming into the Chitika | Premium fold.

Some Technical Details

1. This entire comparison is based on queries entered by humans in the search engines. This is not some contextual stuff or artificially generated ad impression numbers. These are real sponsored search ads like the ones you see at the right of the page when you type a query in google.
2. A nice new trend is that larger publishers (from the Comscore 250) are also coming on board the Chitika | Premium network [This is exciting because till around 2007, Chitika was mostly mid-size publishers]
3. A big part of the growth is due to the fact that we now serve ads across all types of sites. Its no longer only “product oriented” sites. [In fact, finance and health are now big drivers at Chitika]

If you’ve read till here, you probably love data as much as I do :-) .. Drop me an email (alden [at] chitika [dot] com) or comment below if you have any questions. Or drop me a tweet.

About the Author: Alden DoRosario is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Chitika Inc. You can follow Alden on Twitter @adorosario and stay tuned to his insightful and often analytical posts on the blog. Alden is credited with coining the phrase "We are the AFLAC of online advertising"

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