YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews

Been reading a handful of blogs pointing fingers to almost everyone about the recent Chitika fiasco (via shoemoney).

Frankly, there’s no one to be blame here but those who got so fanatical with it head on, even to the point of leaving AdSense over Chitika (only to be disappointed later on). Ahh yes, big brother blogger have been raving about it and hence, the bandwagon effect (isn’t blogging about bandwagons?). So blame them for pointing you to the wrong direction?

From my end, I did sign up for Chitika when I first heard about it. I tried using it to augment the current AdSense placements, not completely replace it. I didn’t use much of it here and replace my AdSense ads with it. In fact, I just use it as an alternate ad to AS. It could get you higher cost-per-click but there’s always the math involve (country coverage, traffic, etc) – which was the main issue of it all.

You read the TOS, and however small the fine print which says auditing is done a month after to remove invalid clicks from non-US traffic, you agreed to it. You logged-in to your acocunt and you saw the hodge-podge layout/design, how lacking the features were, how inefficient and slow the auditing was yet you continue to use it. You posted your un-audited earning in your blog hoping to wow others and maybe even get them under your referral ID.

So who’s to blame now? That’s what you get when you count your eggs before they even hatch. As Marc quipped, “If it’s too good to be true, it ain’t”.

[tags]shoemoney, chitika, affiliate, e-minimalls[/tags]

At long last, Chitika (aff) released the audited traffic reports for October! (Yes, that long.) This is what most bloggers in the Philippines are waiting for — by how much the conversion rate is reduced after the revenues are audited.

I ran the test over at PinoyBlog covering the month of October and November. The daily stats over there include unique visitors in the range of 2,000 to 2,500 contributing to about 15,000 pageviews per day, bringing the total monthly impression to about 470,000. Of which, 59.8% of the traffic comes from the US, followed by Australia at 9.6%, the Philippines at 4%, China at 3.4% and Hong Kong at 2.8%. The rest of 20.4% of the traffic are scattered across a majority of Asian countries.

Since Chitika only accepts traffic from the US, Canada, Western Europe and Australia, this brings the potential conversion ratio to 7 out of every 10 impressions. Not bad, huh? However, the audited traffic report showed only 31% of the clicks were valid while the revenue is just 21% of the total unaudited report. In short, the 70% valid traffic only contributed 31% of the clicks.

In terms of revenues, we only get $0.21 out of every $1.00 that’s being logged before audit.

Those are dismal figures. I’ll stick to AdSense.

Update: More rants here, here, here and here.

I almost totally forgot about my “What happened to” series. I only remebered it after seeing some search keywords that ended up in my blog. See, there are still people who are wondering what happened to these sites/projects.

Anyway, I’m not sure if some of you remembered or knew about Rebelde.com but it was one of the “most controversial” sites during the forums era in the Philippines (circa 2000). Rebelde.com is a new forum and free email service launched in 2000 and owned by some Fil-Am family based in Las Vegas. They literally had hundreds and hundreds of Tagalog domain names used as free emails powered by Outblaze.

It was the only Filipino-targetted forum which offer to pay from Php1.00 to Php10.00 per post to all members That got it to become the talk fo the town. The management tried to buy into PinoyExchange.com but after they were rejected, they reckon they’re better off using the supposed fund to kick-start a new forum and what better way to pump-up membership than to promote pay-per-post. A lot of people were skeptical and there was a huge fight debate amongst the members of both forums.

Anyway, 2 years into the project, and hundreds of thousands of payouts later, the project was canned. The forums were doing well, the shopping service was bringing in sales from OFWs but the emails from Outblaze sucked (though it got Edsamail into some stiff competition). Later on, the forum DB got corrupted and was never restored back.

The plan was scrapped since it was not going the way it should be, which I didn’t understand in the first place even if I was one of the assigned mods in the forum and their “contact person” in the Philippines. It was a classic Bubble 1.0 disaster.