Chitika: eMiniMalls and the competition

Using Chitka with Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network

Update: Read our latest and updated Chitika review here. It replaces some of the information on this older page.

So you've decided to visit Chitika and take their unique, eye-catching, high earnin' ads for a trial run? How do you do that without violating the Adsense TOS. If you've already got Adsense on your site you must be aware of how they deal with those who break their law: they guillioutine them. Well, not quite ... but that's a recurring fear for most Adsense publishers. This page addresses how you can stay within the TOS for both the Adsense and Chitika programs while maximising your income with both.  

(Full list of differences between Chitika and Adsense)

First, the contextual issue

Google forbids any other contextual ad on a page where you are serving Adsense ads. Note, it's not Search but Adsense ads. On pages where you have only Google search but no Adsense ads you can have Chitika eMiniMalls with no problem. But you can also have Chitika on the same page as Adsense ads provided you turn off Chitika's contextual feature (see Chitika's FAQ page). It's simply done by adding this line to your code:

 ch_non_contextual = 1;

Depending on when you got your code from Chitika it may already have this line. If it does then your ads are all non-contextual by default and Chitika won't serve contextual ads on your site (even if you remove that line of code). You have to actually request them to activate contextual ads for you.

Yahoo: The same applies to the Yahoo Publisher Network. Initially they were reluctant to allow Chitika ads on the same pages as YPN ones, but now there are several publishers reporting that they've had the OK from Yahoo provided Chitika is running in non-contextual mode.

Chitika Search: Is it search the way Google sees search?

No, it isn't. There was some initial confusion about this and several publishers wrote to Google for clarification. The essence of Google's reply is that the Chitika search box with the eMiniMalls ads is not a standard search across all pages on the net; it's a search within a specific product category of Chitika's database. It is hence not seen as competing with the Google search box and it is allowed on the same page as Adsense and Google Search. And your visitors can happily hover over the search box, type in a search term and click the result confident in the knowledge that they're not causing you to violate your Adsense TOS.

However, if you do want to turn off Chitika search you can add this line of code to your ad:

ch_nosearch = 1;

Using Chitika as your Adsense Alternate ad

As you know Google serves what are called Public Service Ad - or charity ads - when they don't have an ad that matches your content. But they do have a facility called Alternate Ads that lets you specific something else. For a particular ad size, say 120x600, you could make a 120x600 banner, post it somewhere on your site and give Google that URL to serve instead of PSAs. (You do it on the page where you create your Google Adsense code.) But, you aren't restricted to just an image - you can have pretty much what you want on that alternate ad page you've created - including an ad from Chitika.

The terms and conditions are not as strict

We wouldn't advocate violating anybody's TOS but Chitika allows you to, for example, open more than one account. That alone can make for substantially more earnings than programs which restrict you to a single account.

(Full list of differences between Chitika and Adsense)

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