Don’t Register .www - My Grandma’s Already Confused

June 30th, 2008

Posted in: Industry Pulse

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) voted this past Thursday on a proposal to relax the rules on top-level domains. I know, exciting stuff, right? Basically the ruling ends the restriction to website addresses ending with .com, .net, .org, .ca, .uk, etc., and opens it up for almost any word to be an internet suffix (some restrictions do apply, however, and the names will be monitored).

This opens up a can or worms for any company with a popular website (such as Yahoo!); you will not only have to purchase every iteration of your domain in the .com realm (yahooo.com, yhaoo.com, etc.), but also will now have to “guard” against every new top-level name that pops up; yahoo.cpm, yahoo.xom, etc. This will make it difficult to prevent phishing sites from popping up all the time attempting to exploit your users (at least, those that still type in web addresses - see my diatribe below). While it will undoubtedly cause a whole host of problems; on the positive side, it will also allow people to be even more creative in choosing a domain name to register (as you’ll see on every other site that mentioned this story other than this one…okay, maybe one example).

Rather than listing off all the possible names I’d like to own, I ask this question: what’s in a name anymore?

When pizza.com sold for US$2.6 million earlier this year, I was totally flabbergasted - are domain names REALLY that important anymore? I will admit that there are advantages to a “good” domain name (organic search traffic, high search rankings, the “simplicity” principle that, if I’m looking for pizza, isn’t pizza.com a great place to look?) but isn’t search visibility arguably more important to the “average” user?

For every pizza.com or vodka.com that sells for millions of dollars, there’s a much larger number of companies with non-standard names that become part of the culture, like Flickr, Twitter, Hulu, and countless others. It’s the idea, not necessarily the name. Now, there are naming mistakes that could pose a problem, but you certainly wouldn’t abandon a million-dollar idea if your first choice for a domain isn’t available.

As computer and internet access achieve higher and higher saturation, the number of users that are accessing the internet for the first time is drastically dwindling. Subsequenty, more and more users are achieving what could be considered “familiarity” with the workings of the world wide interwebs. Even the most basic of user has a grasp of the concept of a search engine, and how to find the information they’re looking for (asking the grandkids for help “getting the Google”). Between search engines, bookmarks (both social and non-social) the history bar, advertising, etc., who still memorizes and types web URLs anymore? The destination is more important than how much you paid for the journey (unless it’s advertising; then it matters).

For all the assertions that “.com is the internet”, a rose company by any other name will smell just as sweet, be it rose.rose, rose.flower, or pete.rose. Okay, maybe not the last one.

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The Chitika ($100) Premium Challenge Extended

June 27th, 2008

Posted in: Contests!

Have you taken the Chitika Premium Challenge? Nearly 1700 publishers have already taken advantage of this offer. If you missed out then don’t worry, you now have a second chance to get in on the action, AND if you’ve already taken the challenge, you have another month to earn up to $100.00 from Chitika!

Original deadline: Put the Premium ad code on your page by June 6th and we will match your earnings, up to $100.00, through June 30th.

NEW deadline: Put the Premium ad code on your page by June 30th and we will match your earnings up to $100.00 NOW THROUGH JULY 30th.

Challenge details:
Paste the Chitika|Premium ad code on your page directly above or below your article titles, (this is where Premium works best) and we will match you dollar-for-dollar (up to $100.00).

Did you add Chitika|Premium to your site after the original cutoff date (June 6th)? Don’t worry - you are automatically part of the extended program! We’ll match you up to $100 too.

To take advantage of this offer: Grab the Chitika | Premium Code from your code panel.

New to Chitika? Sign up here.

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Chitika|Premium Success Story - Bankaholic.com

June 26th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Publisher Success Stories

Johns Wu had problems with money while in college (just like most of us). He started Bankaholic.com so that broke students (like himself) could discuss financial issues like college loans, budgeting tips, and debt.

“My site was a huge success that quickly grew to become one of the top 25 most highly trafficked personal finance websites on the web.

“Over the years, monetizing my traffic has always been one of my biggest hurdles. When I was a small website with low traffic, potential advertisers didn’t bother dealing with me. In addition, I did not have the resources to hire salespeople to help sell ads on my site. This was a problem. How was I supposed to expand my website to become a big-time player without funding to fuel my growth?

“I’ve found that advertising brokers like Chitika & Adsense that match advertisers to publishers to be invaluable in monetizing my traffic. I get highly targeted ads with high eCPMs, and I don’t have to spend my time or money selling off my ad inventory myself.

“I have been using Chitika|Premium on Bankaholic.com for about a week now. The CPCs are very fair and have experienced a leap in eCPM from Premium over others. Because most of my traffic is from search, I have no problems getting Chitika ads to display relevant ads. And I really think the small icons ext to the ads do well for CTR, and I am curious why other networks have not followed suit.

“Chitika is one of my higher revenue ad networks especially my eCPM from Chitika|Premium ad units. Overall, I’ve noticed a 300% increase in revenue over what I was using before.”

Want to share your story with the world? Submit your Chitika Success Story or Testimonial here.

Not using Chitika ads yet? Sign up for an account here!

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Chitika|Premium ad unit placement tips

June 24th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Optimizing

What? You haven’t heard about the newest ad unit available from Chitika (which is yielding high eCPM’s for publishers)? Here’s the latest on Chitika|Premium in case you missed it…

Chitika|Premium placement heat map:

Win-Win Ad Unit
Because Chitika|Premium is behaviorally targeted on your pages, users will see optimized results that converts into great revenue for you. When we’re unable to “target” the ad unit, the ad simply collapses into nothing, leaving your page looking like the ad was never there. This is where the other part of “winning” comes into place: You can set an alternate URL for this ad unit so you can earn revenue no matter what.

Users click here to get your Premium Code | Or sign up now

For more optimization tips, check out this blog post.

Coming this week: Publisher Success Story using Premium!

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Chitika awarding grand prize for iFroggy competition

June 20th, 2008

Posted in: Contests!

We’ll be the first to admit that we love sponsoring fun and cool contests. We’re excited to sponsor a new competition, our first of the year, from the iFroggy Network. Think of it as American Idol meets Survivor meets… something else. Contest: phpBBHacks.com phpBB 3 Hacks and Styles Idol.

The competition is a great opportunity for coders and creators to show off some talent and win some great prizes.

Chitika will award one of the following prizes (winners choice!) for the contests’ grand prize:

Click here to read more and enter the contest!

Just a few of Chitika’s previously sponsored events:
Chitika backs The Next Internet Millionaire
SOBCon-07- Dancing Bloggers
Chitika awards $1001 to Problogger.net contest

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Summary of Recent Changes at Chitika

June 18th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Inside Chitika

In light of the recent blog post by our CEO, Venkat Kolluri, I thought I’d add some more breakdown to that blog post.

What happened in the marketplace ?
2008 brought a shift in the marketplace and our advertisers are now paying out on different models, as you can see from the diagram above. Lets take an example of what exactly happened here:

• In 2007: An advertiser (like say “Best Buy” or “Circuit City”) had no problems paying 20-50 cents CPC to get a click from a Publisher (say X). As long as enough of those clicks converted to sales at their end, these advertisers were happy.
• In 2008: The shopping/retail marketplace changed given the tough economic climate in the United States. Now, every advertiser is coming to the table is DEMANDING 2+% conversion rates. In other words, of the 100 clicks sent by Publisher X, atleast 2 should convert into sales.

What is Chitika doing about this ?
To adapt to the new marketplace, Chitika took a couple of steps:

1. Launched Chitika | Premium: This new unit is designed to take advantage of your search engine traffic and pays on a CPC basis. The good thing about this is: Since search engine traffic is high converting, advertisers are happy. Also, since the ads are targeted to the exact queries being typed by users, the content is very good and the CTR is excellent. As you can imagine, users getting good search engine traffic are seeing excellent results on this unit.

2. Launched the Chitika Graphic Ads program: So what happens to traffic that is not from search engines ? Our analysis has shown that these users hardly click on ads. So showing CPC ads to such users (e.g. people who read your blog regularly but never clicks on ads) is a waste of advertising inventory. For such publishers, we implemented a “yield optimization” system to show graphic ads. The beauty of this is that this yield optimization has actually resulted in better results for some of our publishers (specially the ones who used to not get too many clicks before).

3. Launched Direct Ad Sales Initiatives (like AdPro) — This allows the publisher to collect direct revenue from advertisers that might be interested in their site. Stay tuned for more information on this program soon.

Who Will Benefit From these changes ?

1. Publishers with good search engine traffic: The Chitika | Premium unit is working out great for our publishers with good search engine traffic. Such publishers are benefitting from targeted CPC text ads in a competitive marketplace. And on the advertiser side, this creates good conversion rates. This matching of publisher to advertiser is creating a nice health marketplace for all parties involved.

2. Publishers with very high traffic — but who were not getting clicks in the old system. These publishers are now seeing their yields optimized by the chitika system intelligently switching between premium ads and graphic ads.

3. Publishers with good content/brand name sites: These publishers will really benefit from the new tools like AdPro that Chitika is starting to roll out.

Who Will NOT Benefit From these changes ?

Any publisher who does not get significant traffic from search engines. For such publishers, we have made available two options:
a. If you have a high conversion rate (meaning that your clicks convert into sales for the advertisers) you will be successful with the CPA ads.
b. If you have a high amount of traffic (whether it converts or not) you can benefit from our CPM Graphic Ads program.

Publishers who got at least 1000 total impressions during June 2nd-8th 2008, should have got a detailed analysis report from me (Alden DoRosario, CTO) with customized recommendations. This should show key metrics for your traffic along with helpful links and recommendation tips. If you didn’t get this email, checkout the generic version in this blog post.

By Alden DoRosario, CTO Chitika, Inc.

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BlogPreneurs Awarded at TiECON: Video

June 17th, 2008

Posted in: Contests!

As previously mentioned, Chitika partnered with TiECON East to host a contest specifically for bloggers, The Blogpreneur Contest 2008.

The contest was to highlight and celebrate the success of bloggers from around the world. We received many great submissions but in the end, 3 successful bloggers stood out from the rest: Jeffrey Strain, of FinancialHack.com; Al Carlton, of CoolestGadgets.com; and Shawn Collins, of AffiliateTip.com

The winners were honored at this year’s TiECON Conference in Boston, MA. Here is the video of their award ceremony:

Read their winning submissions and more contest details here.

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Chitika Analysis Report: Top Performer Stats + Optimization Tips

June 16th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Optimizing

As a publisher, one often wonders how you stand relative to other
publishers on the Internet (specially the high performing publishers).
What are you doing right (or wrong) ? This is an analysis of 50
high-performing Chitika publishers (i.e. publishers with good traffic
and monetization strategies). I hope you find this data useful AND
actionable. [This analysis was done for a 7 day period between
2nd-8th June 2008].

Please Note: If you had significant traffic during 2nd-8th June 2008
with Chitika, you should be getting a customized analysis report in
your mail soon. Stay Tuned.

Traffic Metrics [ PS: While
there are a ton of factors that go into your traffic, we analyzed what
we feel are the Top 3 factors]

Key Metric	Why this matters	Chitika Top Performer Averages
US Traffic (I.e. How much of your total traffic came from US)	The US market is the most developed and lucrative market for advertising revenue.	56.88%
US Search Engine Traffic (i.e. How much of your US traffic came from search engines)	Searchers Equal Clickers/Buyers. Search engine traffic monetizes the most and converts the best for advertisers.	59.87%
US Search Engine Traffic CTR (i.e. For the traffic that came from search engines, what was the CTR)	Location Location Location - Ad placement decides whether visitors click on the ads	1.64%

So what should you do about this ?

Recommendation	Why this matters	Useful Links
SEO	Optimizing your site for SEO attracts lucrative search engine traffic	http://seobook.com/, http://www.seomoz.org/blog
Traffic	High traffic sites gain from incoming links and also benefit from a “Rich Get Richer” principle.	http://www.problogger.net/
Placement	Moving your ads into high heat zones leads to more clicks	http://crazyegg.com/ (Heat maps), http://www.jensense.com/ (A/B Testing)
US Traffic	Follow the money	http://spyfu.com/
Chitika | Premium	Chitika | Premium has been shown to work great on sites that get good search engine traffic	Chitika | Premium Code

Did I miss something? Continue the conversation or add your own
tips in the comments below.

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Manage Your Direct Ad Sales for FREE with Chitika | AdPro

June 13th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News

Chitika | AdPro is a new hosted self service ad management platform, giving publishers the ability to drive and manage direct ad sales, and keep 100% of their direct ad sales revenue.

Chitika | AdPro:

• Promotes publisher’s ad space to advertisers
• Takes care of campaign set-up
• Manages ad serving
• Measures campaign results

How is this different from Google Ad Manager?
AdPro takes care of all invoicing and collects payments from direct advertisers, saving publishers’ time and resources.

Get Started Now: Login to your Chitika Publisher Account and opt-in to our new program.

OR click here to learn more about Chitika | AdPro.

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What the f#@% is going on at Chitika?

June 12th, 2008

Posted in: Front Page News, Inside Chitika

A message from Chitika CEO, Venkat Kolluri:

Chitika Evolves with changes in the New Marketplace

It’s not all about CPC’s anymore - different types of clicks are attracting different types of revenue. Advertisers are willing to pay on a CPC-basis for clicks from search traffic, and on a CPA basis for clicks from non-search traffic.

We at Chitika responded with changes to our advertising program to better match up the right clicks with the right type of revenue in today’s marketplace. In particular, there were 3 major changes that lead to exciting new opportunities:

1. A larger, diverse set of advertisers spanning all topics and categories

2. The next generation of eMiniMalls - Chitika|Premium - not just restricted to product offers anymore

3. A new behavioral targeting platform, to track and match different types of click traffic (i.e. - search and non-search traffic) with the right offers (i.e. - CPC, CPA and CPM offers).

Change is the only constant factor at Chitika. We will always barge ahead and evolve with the changes in the marketplace to open up the best possible opportunities for our publishers. Let it rip.

-Venkat Kolluri, CEO Chitika Inc.

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