“Bing!”  That sound is a brand new search engine (sorry, “Decision Engine”) from Microsoft leaping into the fray and making everyone’s life a little more Microsoft-y.  Launched in late May, Bing has started taking searches away from reigning powerhouses Google and Yahoo! - and it works great with Chitika | Premium ads.

As much as we love search, and as much as we live by the power of search engines, you didn’t really think we’d be unable to serve ads to Bing traffic, did you?  It’s an exciting new tool that Microsoft hopes will revolutionize the way people search on the Internet.  We’re all over that.

Plus, when I went to grab this screenshot, they had a picture of Boston (where Chitika lives) as the main image.  It was like fate telling us “Yeah, Chitika and Bing work well together.”

So, if your site is getting traffic from Bing, that’s great - your Chitika | Premium ads will continue to show up and be exactly what your site visitors are searching for.

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.