Chitika eMiniMalls: The Best AdSense Alternative

Thomas Hoefter

What Are Chitika eMiniMalls

EMiniMalls are a new advertising system that is published and
run by Chitika, Inc. The "mini malls" are CPC (cost per click)
ads that always advertise one specific product, which is
contextually targeted to your content. Their biggest difference
to normal banner ads is their interactivity: Every ad unit
consists of several tabs which the user can scroll over to view
different information about the advertised product like a
description, reviews, a search function or best deals. You can
see an example ad unit at the href="https://chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=Lunatic">Chitika<
/a> homepage.

Similarities To AdSense

The first thing that's similar to the Google AdSense program is
of course that you are also paid on a per click basis (CPC).
That means that you earn money every time a visitor clicks on
your eMiniMalls, he doesn't actually have to buy the product.
Like AdSense ads the eMiniMalls are very customizable to make
them fit to the look of your website: You can specify the
background color, the border color, the link color and the text
color of your ads and I recommend you to take all those steps to
increase your CTR (click through rate) of your advertisements
considerably. Chitika ads are (again like AdSense) available in
all the different standard banner sizes like for example
leaderboard, skyscraper, rectangle and so on but you can also
choose some quite special formats like blog banner ( which is a
468x180px ad). Altogether there are ten different formats to
choose from.

Differences To AdSense

Main difference to AdSense is of course the look of the ads: Not
only do all eMiniMals include an image of the advertised
product, but the different tabs in the ads do also add a great
deal of interactivity, which is a totally new thing in the
advertising world and helps to draw the users eye to them.
Unlike AdSense you can also choose not to run in contextual mode
(where the advertised products are selected automatically, based
on the page the ad unit is placed on) but to specify the
products yourself. You can then either

Alternative to AdSense - Or Supplement?

One big appeal to use or at least try out Chitika is that you
can in fact use the eMiniMalls together with AdSense ads, at
least as long as you run them in non-contextual mode (which is
the default option). Many publishers have used this chance and
have integrated both advertising services seamlessly into their
pages and therefore often increased their earnings up to 150% of
what AdSense alone would have made them.

Advantages And Disadvantages

Biggest advantage of the eMiniMalls for us publishers is that
they pay much more per click than most AdSense ads do at the
moment, often more than double or triple the amount for the same
keywords. How much exactly depends on the value of the product
that is advertised. A click on an expensive plasma TV
advertisement would pay more than one on a cheap video game for
example. Another incentive of them is the possibility to use
them together with AdSense and the fact that you can get
targeted Chitika ads for virtually every product, niche and
category out there. Since they look much more like actual
advertisements than AdSense (which you can hide very well in
your content) the CTR of eMiniMalls however is nearly in all
cases much lower than with AdSense ads.

To learn more about the Chitika eMiniMalls program and sign up
please look href="https://chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=Lunatic">here
.

About the author:

Thomas Höfter is the webmaster and publisher of several large
music websites, namely the href="http://www.metally.net/">metal music portal
Metally.net, the music
news website MusicTopic and the Guitarrorist, a large href="http://www.guitarrorist.com/">guitar store.

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