Chitika Account Suspended

I decided to go public with my Chitika experience because I think it’s important for other webmasters to understand the risks of jumping on the bandwagon of a hot new web advertiser and to anyone who may consider investing time or resources in such services.

I signed up for Chitika eMinimalls contextual ad service in fall of 2005. Like many webmasters, I was attracted to the novelty of graphically appealing contextual ads featuring comparative shopping that might be a good Google AdSense alternative. After testing Chitika eMinimalls ads on a few sites, I found that their performance justified me keeping them on certain pages, mostly pages with shopping or product specific content. I grabbed my horn and jumped right onto the bandwagon. I even wrote an enthusiastic review of Chitika for Clickfire visitors. I received my first check in November. I was pulling for this little upstart, hoping they’d turn out to be a strong competitor.

I checked my stats daily with a little playful smugness. It was now coming time to receive my first big payment from Chitika. I will not publish the email that I received from Chitika Customer Service as I don’t like to make the contents of private emails public without permission. But, one can imagine the let down I felt when I saw the title: Chitika Account Suspension Notice. Chitika suspended my account due to their belief that fraudulent traffic activities were taking place. My immediate response was:

Dear Chitika Customer Service,

I’ve removed all Chitika ads from my site as requested. Please indicate what is causing the concern in your analysis so I can investigate my server logs and take appropriate steps to prevent recurrence.

After waiting some time and receiving no response, I tried again:

Dear Chitika Customer Service,

I’m writing to inquire about the suspension of my Chitika eMinimalls account. I am not aware of any fraudulent activity on the account and would like to know what is causing Chitika the concern. I am especially vexed about this development because I take great pains to conduct business in an ethical manner. I am eagar to determine how the problem can be corrected and especially when the suspension may be lifted. Please respond and advise me of next steps.

Unable to get any kind of response, I decided to cut my losses and move on to other things. Chitika is very new to a young market. The company would surely be a target for click fraud by unscrupulous webmasters. That’s understandable. It is less easy to overlook the customer service issue. After all I’d invested in Chitika, I expected the courtesy of a reply.

I, and I suppose other unsuspecting webmasters are casualties of Chitika’s youth and extremely rapid growth. After having suffered some loss, I have to wonder…Will Chitika survive? This whole experience taught me that any PPC based advertising network must be able to discern fraudulent publishers from the good guys. Goodbye, Chitika. No hard feelings.