YPN + Chitika = Disaster?

[Clinton]

When it comes to alternatives to Adsense, there aren't many. There was YPN and Chitika. Both served niche markets. YPN was US only. Despite all the noises over the years they never managed a roll-out to the rest of the world. Chitika worked better than Adsense for some. Problogger, for one, has been evangelical about it from the start. But for many others it just didn't measure up and, like YPN, it lacked that global reach.

Then Chitka and YPN got into bed together. Or rather, Chitika took over YPN. Things were looking up. Now perhaps the combined clout of these two programs could make them the Apple Mac to the Adsense PC.

But it's all gone badly wrong.

Chitika last month decided that they were going to improve quality of the sites in their network. Fair enough. They decided that the best way to do it was to have an approval process. Again, fair enough. Then they shot themselves in the foot by figuring that the best way of approving individual sites in each account was to start with a clean slate and disapprove every site in every account.

<Deep intake of breath here>

Worse: They are still serving ads to all those accounts - but just stopped paying publishers for the money made on the ads because these long standing sites from long standing publishers are "not yet approved". And the approvals are progressing at a pace that wouldn't put them in even the snail olympics.

That's of course p*ssed off more than a few publishers. Many have left in droves and there's lots of muttering in the market.

examples: 1 | 2

Do any of you have a Chitika account? Have you found your earnings suddenly down to $0? Have any of your sites been "approved" now?

[hooperman]

I'm running Chitika on a few sites but it makes only ~ $50 / month. Of course I'd ignored all emails informing me of theses changes but I just checked and my earnings have crashed (from the lofty heights of $50 ).

Unless requirements for approval have changed drastically, it strikes me as odd that they would force re-approval on every single site. Minimal disruption = fail.

[Andy]

Yeah but think of all the $$ they don't have to pay out while enforcing the new "policy". Might just pay for their purchase if someone doesn't start legal action.

Thanks for the alert Clinton. While Chitika never deigned to approve my account to begin with (maybe a good thing in this light?), it would be worthwhile to examine any sites I might be interested in claiming income from these two.

Andy

[QualityNonsense]

Just logged into my Chitika account for the first time this month & had a nasty surprise.... $0 earnings.

IT's a real shame - it used to massively outperform AdSense on one or two sites I ran it on.