I love technology. Without it [the Internet], so many people I know and don’t know but know about wouldn’t be making a living on our terms. And that goes both ways; for people who have products and services who advertise and publishers of websites. Now, we have another company who creatively and effectively uses technology to deliver value to advertisers, publishers and themselves – the technology providers. Who am I talking about? Why Chitika eMiniMalls of course.

What is it? Let’s just say it’s a combination of Google Adsense and an online store’s affiliate program. You display product ads from stores and get paid by the click. But these aren’t your regular ads. Depending on the size, they contain a picture about the product, shipping and pricing information. People can even search for available deals to do comparison shopping.

I’ve only used it for 4 days and wow! I earned 3.5 times more than Adsense in those 4 days. Impressive indeed. Earnings aside, Chitika has a lot more to do by manner of reporting in my opinion. It’s ok but could be better like including channel information in the overview. Also it’ll be nice to have a way to manage your channels instead of doing it manually – maybe I missed it. Tiny annoyances nothing major. 

There are two ways the ads are called. Contextually or through your chosen keywords. If you choose contextual, Chitika reviews your site much like Adsense to serve up relevant ads. But this is turned off by default. You enter your own keywords. Doing this also makes the program compatible with Adsense and honestly I prefer this a lot better. Why? Let’s see… on one online ethnic community of mine, Adsense seems to only want to serve up ads for uhm… “ethnic women” or “meet (fill in ethnicity here) women”. That is just not appropriate since that site consists of people who are married, committed, with kids and rather religious. So… using information from a poll I did once, I put keywords relevant to their interests in Chitika and am getting nice ads I think will appeal to them. This is just set up so I’m waiting anxiously to see how that goes.

The other problem I have with Adsense especially on blogs – it’s almost impossible to get ads other than blog type ads. By choosing my own keywords on Chitika I have better control of what ads get displayed that will appeal to my readers.

You’ll hear me discuss this more in coming days and weeks these are just some initial thoughts. If you’d like to try it out, I encourage you to go ahead, there is no cost involved except maybe a little bit of your time to put the links up.