A few months back they changed something in their system and started rating publisher sites in a gold/silver/bronze type system and ranking payout on some different criteria. Revenue for me, and apparently many others, plummeted. I worked with it for many, many weeks, much longer than I should have, hoping to figure out what the best way to tweak the performance was, but never did find that happy medium. I went from a few dollars a day to being lucky if I cleared even a cent.
This morning I decided to finally throw in the towel on Chitika for good. I went to my OpenX account and created a campaign to replace those spaces, using Amazon affiliate ads as primary spaces and using OpenX Network as backfill if a decent CPM is available.
I have found that the OpenX backfills is actually a decent backfill system and does toss a few dollars a month in what, in the case of Chitika, would otherwise be nothing at all. I have found Amazon to be less and less effective over the last couple years, but you can still get a little bit...and we, as ad publishers, know very well that a little bit is better than absolutely nothing, which is precisely what Chitika had given me of late.
