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.

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!

Well the number-crunchers can rejoice as that feature is now live - reports can now be downloaded to CSV format which you can open into any spreadsheet software of your choice. This gives you MUCH more flexiblity over how you view/review your data, and allows you to view the reports however YOU want to view them. All you need to do is go to the reports tab, then just click the “Download Excel Report” link in the reports page and save the file to your computer:

This will work for the defualt (unaudited stats) report, or any customized reports you run (check this out for a recap on how to customize your reports). Also, don’t forget that you can have your reports sent to your email automatically by using the “Report Scheduling” feature on any of your saved reports.

Are there other features that you would like to see added to our reporting system? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

The first picture of eMiniMalls Escolas!!

Congratulations to Karla and Mike on their 6 lb, 5oz bundle of Chitika branding power!

(Okay, so they didn’t name her “eMiniMalls”, but we’re very, very happy for them!)

1.) The first-ever Chitika staff meeting took place at a Wendy’s in Waltham, MA.

2.) One of the names considered for the eMiniMalls ad unit was ‘MiniPortal’ (but nobody understood what the heck it meant).

3.) Karla Escolas, who has done such an incredible job as the editor of this blog for the past two years, will be leaving very soon on maternity leave. We wish Karla, her husband Mike, and their new baby-to-be (who will, no doubt, be named eMiniMalls Escolas) the best of luck and best of health over the next few months!

^{First picture taken of eMiniMalls Escolas, circa 2010}

The interim editor of this blog, Daniel Dore, will introduce himself in a self-indulgent post on Monday. Stay tuned!

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.

Editor’s note: I don’t understand most of the references in this post, but I’ve been assured they make sense.

Strap on your hockey skates and order up a “double-double” at Tim Hortons because we’re happy to announce we now support traffic from Canada in our Chitika | Premium ad program!

While it may seem like this post is mostly aboot making fun of our friends in the great white North, the truth is that we love Molson and poutine just as much as they do (well maybe not as much as they do - but we do love it!). The great news is that Chitika | Premium now supports your traffic from Canada, for any website or blog traffic from ‘A’ to ‘Zed’, so enjoy the additional loonies you will earn.

Click here to learn more about Premium ads, or…

Chitika|Premium ad units: Behaviorally-targeted ad units that shows text ads from a diverse set of advertisers.

Steps for easily getting started:

1. Login to your account / Sign up for Chitika

2. Once logged in, click the arrow on the Get Code tab, then choose Chitika|Premium:

3. Follow the simple Steps to choosing your format size, ad unit colors, and setting your alternate URL (optional), then COPY YOUR CODE by clicking in the code box.

4. Now you paste the code on your website/blog.
Use this heatmap for placement tips.

How to insert Premium into The New Blogger, Classic Blogger, WordPress, TypePad Pro, TypePad Basic or Plus.

Over the last couple of weeks, a host of ad networks have begun using Chitika | Premium within their own advertising inventory; some small, some much, much larger (Think: Comscore Top-50 type). This post is about the dynamics of using Chitika | Premium in your own ad network. [Due to the sensitivity of each ad network’s business model, I cannot ‘name any names’ in this blog post]

Please Note: If you don’t own or work for an ad network, you might want to stop reading :-)

What is Chitika | Premium?
Chitika | Premium is a behaviorally-targeted ad unit that shows text ads from a diverse set of advertisers. Here are some features of this unit:

• Large diverse set of inventory. There are advertisers for pretty much everything under the sun (from “Batman” to “baseball” to even “Britney Spears”)
• Very highly targeted: Ads are targeted to user behavior (specially search behavior). Due to this, the CTR is high (much, much higher than regular banner AND text ads)
• Clean content: The format is aesthetically pleasing and clean, so your users find this appealing (there is none of the flashing stuff that will make your publishers mad!)

Why would I use Chitika | Premium?
One word: Backfill. Also…

• No channel conflict (there is a good chance you and Chitika are not going after the same advertisers. And if this happens to be the case, Chitika has the systems to exclude your advertisers)
• We only take the inventory we can deliver on, so there is no inventory wasted. If we can’t deliver, we redirect back to your ad server.

How does the implementation work?
The concept is simple: You use the Chitika | Premium ad unit for parts of your inventory. If we have a behavioral profile on this user, we show the unit. If not, we redirect back to your ad server so that the next campaign in line can run.

What Ad servers are supported?
At this time, we have tested this with Doubleclick, 24/7 Realmedia’s OAS and Openads/Openx/phpAdsNew . If your ad server is not on this list, contact us and we should be able to make it work (our engineers are smart and have gallons of coffee at their disposal!)

Who to Contact?
If you are an ad network and this sounds interesting to you, please contact Jeff Sable (jeff [at] chitika [dot] com) OR call 866-441-7203 and select option 1.

Chitika Inc. was founded just 5 years ago in 2003 and since then, we’ve created over 70+ power-packed revenue-earning ad units for our publishers. We increased our publisher base by almost 15,000 in the past year alone by expanding our advertiser inventory to be suitable for ALL types of websites.

Here’s a list of a few of the awesome things we’ve done over the years that got us where we are today…

• Chitika extends referral program from 12 to 15 months so publishers have extra revenue for the holiday season.
• Chitika experts get busy providing Holiday Expert Optimizations in Chitika SPHERE
• Chitika kicks off the Facebook referral program & eMiniMalls Facebook API
• Chitika releases first study estimating the revenue in the blogosphere - $500 Million
• Chitika launches Premium Publishers Club
• Chitika publishes 3 eBooks
• Chitika continuously adds to its growing list of awards
• Referral program continues on strong! Now offering two kinds of referral programs!
• Chitika launches new lineup of services: OnDemand, a Self-Service Advertising Program & AdPro is a new hosted self service ad management platform

Keep up with us and our journey to the next 26,000 by subscribing to The Chitika Blog and/or by signing up for our monthly Newsletter.