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 Chitika 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 on the same page, 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. This often balances the fact that eMiniMalls have a higher CPC rate and brings the earnings down to a level closely comparable to AdSense.

You can sign up for the eMiniMalls program here.

Thomas H