Recently, Yuga posted on his Chitika eMiniMalls experiment.  Chitika is basically one of the (many?) several affiliate / ad programs on the ‘net.

You may notice that I’ve put up several of the eMinimalls on the J Spot as well.

What’s good about it is that apparently you can mix Chitika with Google AdSense without violating the AdSense Terms of Service, which stipulates that you can’t mix other contextual-based advertising with Google’s Ads.  With the Chitika eMiniMalls, you can actually choose the actual brand or type of product that will appear instead of having an ad generated automatically according to context.

And IMHO, Chitika takes online advertising up one level by actually

offering a way of checking out or searching for products on-site.  This is good if

you perceive your readers to be the type who are likely to buy

or look for stuff online–or at least for checking the specs of items of interest (i.e.,

most of my ads are gadget-related).  With Google AdSense, sometimes,

you are not sure where the link you click will lead you to–and some of these are sites for intangibles, and not exactly hard commodities.

Chitika also has an affiliate referral program where publishers can get

a commission off their referrals revenues for a year.  In case you’d

like to sign up, here’s the link for my referral:

Oh, and the minimum earnings for a payout is US$10 for Paypal accountholders and US$50 for non-Paypal (i.e. payout will be thru check).  Google’s is US$100.

Some negative points, though.  The valid clicks only come from several countries at this time, namely the US, UK, Canada and France–they do not count clicks from Asia, which I think is understandable because of the nature of the business.  They’re a “mini-mall,” after all, and they expect the clickers to actually be those likely to buy online (a practice Asian Internet users have yet to adopt).  And of course, there’s the risk of “click-fraud.”  But in this case, unlike Google’s cancelling/freezing your revenues, they audit your earnings at the end of each month, where the ineligible clicks are weeded out.

At any rate, like Yuga, about half of my traffic comes from North America.  So I’ve yet to see how the tradeoff between more clicks and possibly better per-click earnings but with fewer counted clicks would fare.

I like the concept.  Things are becoming more interesting, huh?

You may wish to check out the Chitika FAQ here.

So here’s to a successful eMiniMalls campaign!

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