All across these crazy interwebs, I’ve been reading report after report of doom-and-gloom for online advertising companies.  A couple weeks ago I saw Glam Media change their payout process.  Since then, various sites have reported that even the big search engines are losing steam.

While TechCrunch reports a massive slow-down in growth for the “Big 3″ (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft grew only 0.6% from Q2 to Q3), we actually saw something quite different at Chitika - 200% growth from May - October.

Over these 5 months, our publisher base has actually doubled from 17,000-34,000, and in October we served 550 million search-targeted ads (out of over 2 billion total ad impressions) .  To put this in perspective, Ask.com (the world’s 5th-largest search engine) did 364 million search queries according to the August 2008 ComScore reports, meaning that our network almost doubled their amount of search traffic in October.

This leads to the question: Why is Chitika seeing this growth?  2 words:  Ad-Targeting.

The Chitika Premium Interesting Placement Contest began Oct. 30th, and since then we have received over 100 contest entries from our users! We were so very impressed with many of the placements we saw that it made it very hard to choose only 3 winners - big thanks to everyone who participated.

First place: $100 Winner - Elran Oded, co-founder at Indyish.com
Elran did something really cool.. he placed the unit so that it’s actually integrated within his first paragraph text. Users who come directly to his website will see a normal paragraph of text but those coming from a search engine will see a large Premium ad unit with the text wrapping around to the side of the unit.

Here is what Indyish.com looks like without the Premium ad unit:

And here is what Indyish.com looks like with the winning Premium ad integration:

And now for our two runner-ups:

$50 runner-up: Richard Cloutier, SweepstakesLovers.com

$50 runer-up: James Nardel, FreeWeddingToasts.net

A BIG thanks again to all our users who sent in their Premium integrations!!

This was not Chitika’s first contest and this will definitely not be the last! We love attending/hosting events and we really love giving stuff away for free. Subscribe to the blog now to be sure you don’t miss out on our next contest giveaway.

Keep the entries coming everyone - so far we have received over 70 entries by email and a handful on the blog! The contest is almost over! Submit your entry for the most interesting/cool/unique placements of Chitika | Premium ads by posting a link to your site in the comments section in this blog post here.

Here is an example of a interesting Premium placement.

First place winner will receive $100, and 2 runners-up will receive $50 each.

Enter now by posting your site in the comments here!

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What are Chitika | Premium ads?
Sign up: www.chitika.com/signup

Lots of people keep asking us - How does Chitika | Premium work?  Well we decided that the best way to explain it is by creating a quick video:

PS: If you dont like the Youtube version: Download and view the Hi-Res Video (9.7 MB)

To get stated, grab your Chitika | Premium code here.

Not a member yet?  Apply for Chitika here.

We are giving away a total of $200 for the most interesting/cool/unique placements of Chitika | Premium ads!

What do you mean by “interesting/cool/unique” placements?
Well take this for example:

Why is this cool/interesting/unique?
Because it is placed inside the content (right after the first paragraph) - which will generally earn a very high CTR/eCPM.  But since it will only display to search engine traffic, it will not display to your regular readers (they won’t be annoyed by ads in the middle of their content!).

What are the prizes?
First place winner will receive $100, and 2 runners-up will receive $50 each.

How do I enter?
You can submit your entries by posting a link to your site in the comments below - entries must be received by 12:00 pm US EDT on Monday, Nov. 10.  We look forward to seeing what you all come up with!!!

If you don’t have Chitika | Premium code yet, you can grab it here.  Also - if you are unfamiliar with Chitika | Premium, you can learn how it works here.

UPDATE:  The contest is now closed. Thank you all so much for your entries - we saw a lot of great implementations!  You can see who the winners are here.

One of my favorite TV shows is The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters - for those of you unfamiliar, the concept of the show is that the hosts and a team of sidekicks confront popular myths (”The moon landing was faked!“) and test them out to see if they’re true, possibly true, or untrue (”busted”).

I love this idea, especially for a company like us here at Chitika; now, we’re not going to blow something up with a ton of dynamite like the Mythbusters crew, but I wanted to confront a few myths about Chitika in something I like to call:

Let’s get started!

“Chitika & AdSense can’t run on the same page”

Absolutely, completely, 100% not true. All of our ad units, including our Chitika | Premium ads, are designed so they can run on the same page as AdSense without violating their Terms of Service. You don’t have to alter the Chitika code at all to make it AdSense-compatible - every piece of ad code you generate from your Chitika code panel is already AdSense-compatible. You can read more about this question in a previous blog post, or you can check out the article in our knowledgebase with links to articles from specific publishers.

“Chitika is a ‘replacement’ for AdSense”

Again, this is not true. Chitika’s ads are not a replacement for your AdSense ads, and any ad network telling you to replace your AdSense with their product will probably cost you revenue. Our ads are meant to be a complement to your AdSense revenue, for a number of reasons:

• The look-and-feel of the ads are different, so any readers that have developed an “ad-blindness” to AdSense will be more receptive to the Chitika ads and more likely to earn you more revenue than AdSense alone.
• Ad targeting is handled differently, so different content will be shown. Chitika’s ads are all keyword-based including our Premium ads, which use a reader’s search term (the search term they entered to get to your page) as the keyword.
• Our Premium ads will only display when relevant, so it opens up a world of new placement options. When a user is not coming to your page from a search (like users that have your site bookmarked), we will not serve an ad and the ad does not appear, so you can place the ad unit within your content and your “regular” readers will not even know it’s there. Here’s a very informative graph on this very issue.

  I think we can call that…
  

  “Chitika only does product ads!”

  I will quickly call this one not true, as well. Since it’s release back in May, our Chitika Premium ads have helped us go way, way beyond product sites by serving ads for anything you can imagine.

  
  

  These ads help sites of all types make money, from the b5media network of over 300 sites, to sites such as bankaholic.com.

  Once again…
  

Our publisher support and sales support teams have received a number of inquiries on adding Chitika Premium ads to Google Ad Manager, Google’s new…ad manager. This was the method I used to get up-and-running:

1. Set up an order for the Chitika Premium ads (I called it “Chitika | Premium” because I’m creative) and approve the order.



2. Create a “line item” for the Chitika ads (setting the type as ‘CPC’ and the other metrics as you wish)



NOTE: I manually set the “weighting” to 10 and the targeting to U.S. and Canada traffic, and restricted it to users coming from the major search engines, in lieu of setting up an ad campaign as the “alternate” URL; if this method does not ‘work’ for you, you may need to specify another campaign as the “alternate URL (contact our customer support for instructions).



3. I uploaded the Premium ad as a Rich Media creative and saved the result; if you cannot see the ad after saving it you might need to use the “#chitikatest” preview tool.



4. Once I created the campaign, I created a new ad slot (or, you can use an existing ad slot) for the Chitika | Premium ad



5. I then added it to a placement on the site



6. …and generated sample HTML to try it out on my page.

Questions? Comments? Let us know!

FAQ: How can I integrate and use Chitika Premium Ads along with Google AdSense on my website to maximize my revenue?

THE ANSWER:

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.

The magicians engineers are cooking up a cool new Chitika ad unit - the Chitika search unit:

As you can see, your users will have the ability to search your site, or search the web, all without leaving the page (results are displayed inside the unit).  We will have 2 separate tabs - 1 for sponsored results (which you get paid for clicks on), and 1 for results from your domain or the web:

This unit is extremely cool for 3 main reasons:

1. It is a search box that actually generates revenue for you.
2. It keeps your users on your page.  Many search boxes display results on a different page, and a high percentage of users don’t end up coming back to your site because of this.
3. Many of our publishers have expressed disappointment that we cannot provide Premium ads for all of their traffic (since Premium will only display to search engine traffic).  This unit will increase Premium impressions, thus increasing your revenue.

What do you think about this new offering?  Is this something that you would use on your site?  Are there features missing that you would like to see added?  Let us know in the comments below!