With the upswing in the number of Linux boxes (thank you netbooks and Dell) and as much interest we have in the search engine market, we at Chitika thought we’d take a look at the search habits of our open-source friends. We compared the OS and search engine data for 163,211,927 searches – a sample of the Chitika network’s search data from July 30th through August 16th – and the results were quite interesting. Check them out:

Sure, Google dominates search across all categories, but what’s surprising is that a whopping 94.61% of all Linux search traffic was from Google, compared with 78.54% of Windows user searches. Compare that with Microsoft’s new “decision engine” Bing, which is holding steady at about 8% of Windows users, but is getting practically no use whatsoever by Linux users – just 0.77% of Linux searches were from Bing. Even Ask.com outdoes Bing for Linux users.

The raw numbers:

We at Chitika are quite fond of search engines: since all of our ads serve only to search traffic, they’re our bread and butter in the online world. So with Microsoft’s new Bing decision engine making so much noise, we thought we’d take a closer look at the clickthrough rates of visitors from the three major search players: Yahoo!, Google, and Bing.

As it turns out, Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users. You can check out the full results of our research in TechCrunch’s article, “Are Bing Users Twice As Likely To Click On An Ad Than Google Users?” Enjoy!

Just like anything, Twitter is hated among some people purely for the reason that so many others love it. The human psychology of Twitter is that it’s easier to love something someone hates and vice versa. But Twitter actually plays on the human nature of people in many interesting ways, and this is what makes it hard to avoid.

I was once a Twitter “non-believer”, SHOCKED? I know - but it’s true, you can blame the month of dead silence coming from the Official Chitika Twitter account on boring ol’ me before I was shown the Twit-light - not to be confused with the teen-girl phenomenon Twilight, of course.

Simply put, how else could you directly listen, in real time to, or connect, with someone you may have otherwise never seen or heard a word from ever in your lifetime? Twitter. It’s almost as if you took a super-telescope and pointed it around the world, into your customers, users, publishers, heroes and even idols computer screens where they are typing their very thoughts, options and actions. Simply put again, Twitter directly connects you to a world ultimately unreachable & unseen.

Let Twitter play to your EGO
Don’t stand behind the super-telescope forever. Get out there and talk. Meet people, talk to people.. because they want to talk to you. Once you start getting followers, RT’s, @’s and direct messages- you will feel very relevant in the Tworld. And unlike Facebook, MySpace, etc., this never gets boring. Why? There is always a larger audience, access to more people and their lives, stories, opinions, friends & followers without trying or having to friend request them. It’s more reachable than other social networks, so it will be less likely to lose your interest. And because Twitter cleverly plays into personal ego, it would be hard for someone to leave. This emotional connection will keep it afloat for a very long time, and this is why advertising will not kill Twitter…

Twitter and advertising
What gives Twitter an edge over Facebook and Myspace is right now, it’s the only of its kind. Twitter also has a dominant number of people who use Twitter for business reasons because it brings great value. So the question is not whether advertising will kill Twitter (because thats impossible) but how much it will be affected. I do not see a domino-effect of dropped users just because of ads, but I do see many being annoyed about it.

But even then, will users really be able to give up the on-going benefits? We already know that Twitter captures an emotional involvement to people, and right now, the only content on someone’s Twitter page is info all about them. So advertising could either cause a personal invasion to users, which could alter the way people feel about Twitter or use it, or they could value the benefits of the system and move on. Nothing in life is free. Who could really blame Twitter for falling into the human nature of survival? How can someone criticize something they use for free for wanting due-financial credit? So my answer is, no. But that’s just me…

What are your thoughts about advertising on Twitter?

-Karla Escolas - Chitika, Inc.

Follow Karla on Twitter! @KarlaChitika

More on Twitter:
Advertising on Twitter, by Dan Ruby

Microblogging behemoth Twitter has seen a massive increase in popularity lately – partly due to the much-ballyhoed Ashton Kutcher vs. Larry King and CNN race to be the first to one million users, partly due to Oprah the Queen of Everything making her debut, and partly because more and more people are realizing that Twitter is awesome and fun. They’re also realizing that, yes, they do care what you had for breakfast while you were on vacation in Omaha. Under all of these media microscopes, the elephant in the room is impossible to miss – how does Twitter go ahead and become as good at making money as it is at making trivial yet interesting conversations?

Can Twitter lift the money whale?

Looking back at the beginning of Twitter, it was a tool made popular by the edgy, hip South by Southwest crowd. Following in the footsteps of those who went before – MySpace, Facebook, and the lot – it took a while before the hipsters were joined by businesses trying to sell to them. Suddenly, in the past year or two, Twitter has become the favored golden child of the Interwebs, replacing Facebook, who replaced MySpace (and thus MySpace begat Virb, and Virb begat Friendster, and I begat an aspirin and a lie-down).

The question now becomes, does Twitter actually have a chance to take all this success and all these millions of users and turn them into what every business venture truly needs: profit? Popular wisdom says that, when it comes to monetizing boatloads of users on a website, you have two choices: charge people to use the service, or drop a ton of ads on the site. Both of these strategies scare the heck out of me in regards to Twitter, and either could spell the beginning of the end of the site’s relevance if done wrong.

Consider pay-to-use. There’s no way Twitter could ever charge regular users without completely decimating their user-base, particularly when fifty new “Free Twitter” services would be standing by, flush with venture capital funding, ready to aggressively steal all of Twitter’s disenfranchised Tweeples. Celebrities would also fly the coop (more bird references, har har); the major Twittering celebrities are arguably more valuable to Twitter than Twitter is to them, so why would they pay for the privilege of lending their name, credibility, and fame to a service that’s charging them?

The idea of having businesses pay to use Twitter has been bandied about before. This, in my opinion, is the best possible way of bringing pay-to-play to the Twittersphere. Businesses small and large have begun making incredible use of Twitter – look at the success of Zappos, Mimobot and JetBlue (two biggies, one smaller company, all making creative and successful use of Twitter). Given Twitter’s astronomical growth and influence, would these and other companies be willing to pay a monthly fee in order to have access to this large, trendsetting audience? Absolutely.

The other monetization method, almost as old as graphical web browsers, is online advertising. Sure, it makes sense to those of us who serve ads online for a living – why wouldn’t we want a 30 or 50 or however many million user pool to advertise to? But again, the pressing question is how one does it. Some say (and I, for one, agree) that the demise of MySpace as a network worthy of being taken seriously can be directly tied to its transformation from legitimate social network to massive conglomeration of ads with your name and birthday in the middle of them. Facebook, too, has badly tarnished its reputation with its attempts to serve ads to its users – just look at stories from late 2007 and the revolt against their “social advertising” attempts.

It’s truly sad to see both of those sites in such disarray simply because they wanted to actually make money at their businesses. MySpace and Facebook both once held the position Twitter now finds itself in. Once the ads come, the South by Southwest-attending trendy core of users migrates to the next big thing, feeling betrayed by the free service they’ve been using and enjoying for years (and, to be honest, they’ve been conditioned to expect to be free of both charge and advertisements). So what can Twitter do to prevent itself from suffering such a fate?

Innovate.

While Facebook’s “social advertising” was an unmitigated disaster, they had the right idea – take what you do best, and make it your twist on traditional advertising. No banner ads. No contextual text ads. No pop-ups (for God’s sake, no pop-ups). Take the social interactions that drive your service’s popularity and craft advertisements that fit into that shoe. Twitter could do this – Twitter users could have a checkbox in their profile that allows Twitter’s ad partners to Tweet ads to them occasionally, based on keywords taken from the Twitter user’s Tweets over a certain period of time. Unobtrusive to the Twitterer, as it’s a part of their regularly scheduled program, well targeted, and with great potential to include advertisers’ Twitter names.

In the end, the most important thing is that Twitter monetizes. This isn’t 1998, and the venture community won’t value a service without some method of its making money. It’s up to Twitter to decide how to do that without alienating its user base and turning itself into another fallen social media giant. Twitter needs to ask itself a few questions before proceeding: is being the next MySpace so bad (after all, they got a ton of money from Google in exchange for their advertising problems)? How much credibility are they willing to sacrifice for cash, if any? And, perhaps most importantly, how influential are the Twitter first-movers, and how much damage would Twitter suffer by seeing them leave?

You can follow the author or Chitika on Twitter at @DanielRuby or @Chitika

Jennifer Slegg of JenSense.com was one of four star panelists who judged a search application contest sponsored by Chitika at SES NY, Chitika|SearchAppalooza.

The video below captures her contribution as a contextual advertising expert, critiquing the app developers on how well they were able to create search app’s that have what it takes to stand out in today’s competitive market for creative tools.

Click here to see the video, or watch below:


Big thanks to Jennifer Slegg for her participation in this successful event!

Not using Chitika to earn revenue from your website yet? Click here to sign up now.

Chitika is taking SES NYC ‘09 by storm!

Send us a note if you are coming–we are offering all Chitika friends 20% off SES full conf passes, and free exhibit passes.

What’s in store?

Our SES “SearchAppalooza” workshop will feature Chitika’s “Kick-Ass Search App” contest…“Think American Idol for developers, with Yahoo! and Microsoft as the judges.” Read more…

Stop-by our SES booth (#230) and meet “Hooty the Search Owl” –a 6′4″, fluffy owl who loves to play frisbee.

Can’t attend?

You can win cool stuff & watch SearchAppalooza from your couch.

• SearchAppalooza Twitter Contest for an Amazon Kindle2!
  To enter, click here to post a SearchAppalooza tweet.
• Watch SearchAppalooza live web-cast fan page.

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.

Chitika’s Tessa Rudd is interviewed by BtoB Magazine on cutting edge trends in search marketing. Rudd shares insight on Chitika’s Search Behavior Marketing (SBM) targeting technology:

BtoB: So this goes beyond the search engine results page?

Rudd: Absolutely. It’s true that search engine marketing campaigns [SEM] can drive highly targeted, intent-driven search traffic and produce measurable ROI, but search can be made to work harder. Search Behavior Marketing [SBM] extends the visibility of a keyword campaign by redirecting an advertiser’s keyword-based targeting channel beyond the search engine to target the same audience when they move into content Web sites. Click here to read interview.

  

Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook and seobook.com posted an article today calling Chitika the “5th search engine” and offered the following observation:

They have been aggressively signing up bloggers and other independent publishers, and are now getting over 2 billion monthly impressions, with their behaviorally targeted Premium ads getting hundreds of millions of monthly search driven impressions, putting their search distribution network on par with Ask.com.

Click here to read the rest of the article.