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1.0Chitika — No More Malls, Lots More Money
Info links and Vibrant Media all fit so neatly into your site you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page.
You will notice the difference in your revenues though.
Chitika’s ads are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eyecatching and attractive.
They’ve gone through a few incarnations over the last few years. The original eMiniMalls, with their pictures and tabs, were a great start. But they weren’t perfect. On pages that didn’t talk about products, the units were largely ignored. I tended only to use them on product pages.
And it turns out that advertisers weren’t 
completely happy with them either. Even though they were generating plenty of clicks, those clicks weren’t
completely happy with them either. Even though they were generating plenty of clicks, those clicks weren’t
producing large numbers of sales. So the advertisers told Chitika that they wanted more. They told Chitika that they didn’t just want clickthroughs of at least 2 percent; they wanted conversion rates of at least 2 percent.
That’s some tall order. Chitika has no control over what users do once they’ve clicked the ad. It’s not the ad system’s job to persuade users to buy.
That’s the seller’s job. All a good ad system can do is serve ads that match users’ needs and make the units look appealing.
Chitika’s eMiniMalls were doing that very well.
Fig. 1.2 Chitika’s eMiniMalls made me smile. They’re gone now.
But faced with the loss of advertisers unhappy at paying for leads that didn’t convert, Chitika was forced to do a little re-thinking.
So they replaced eMiniMalls with Premium ads, which look a bit like AdSense units but with embedded images. We’ve already seen them on DealofDay.com.
To ensure those high conversion rates though, Chitika chose not to make all of these ads available to every user. If you lived in the United States or Canada, entered a keyword into a search engine, clicked the