I recently did a comparison of the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) and Chitika eMiniMalls, as I did once before with the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google AdSense. As some of you may know Chitika has been getting a lot of hype lately, but I honestly don’t think it’s warranted. Those bloggers that so aggressively promote it are hoping that their readers click their referral link and sign up for the program, which gives them 10% of whatever you earn through Chitika (same will happen if you click the link I provided above – that is of course if I’m still a member of the program when you do).

What kind of pay-out can I expect?
My own experience with Chitika showed that it made about twenty-five times less revenue than YPN. The average Click-through rate (CTR) was pretty much the same as YPN, but Chitika’s average Cost Per Click (CPC) was only a pitiful $0.02 making it the lowest paying ad network I’ve been a part of – this includes Google AdSense and Value Click Media.

How can I make money off eMiniMalls?
My final evaluation of Chitika eMiniMalls is that it doesn’t work unless you have ads directly related to your content, this might mean you’ll have to write reviews of certain products and then make sure your ad code has that specific product listed or just rely on their contextual option. I’m sure if I spent the time to target higher paying keywords I could make more money with Chitika, but I wasn’t too keen on having such intrusive ads appear on my sites in the first place, so I think I’ll just stick with text-based ads for now. For those of you currently using AdSense you can use Chitika eMiniMalls alongside it for extra revenue as long as the contextual option is not on, though this might change in the future depending on Google’s policies.

What are some niches or keywords you’d suggest?
If your website falls under any of the following categories you can expect a decent pay-out: Cell Phones, Finance Software, Medical Software, Spyware Removal, Electronics Rentals, and Dieting. Generally, the aforementioned topics pay well on any ad network though.