Chitika | Select - expanding beyond search-traffic

On Mon 8 March, Chitika are introducing Chitika Select, a new advertising product that displays ads to some additional readers. This article is an initial overview of the implications for Blogger users.

Background:

Previously I've given an overview of Chitika.

At the time I wrote it, ads were only shown to visitors from the US and Canada (based on their IP address) who got to the website by searching. That has now changed.

What's Changing?
From Mon 8 March 2010, Chitika are introducing a new product called Chitika | Select, which they're describing as an upgrade to Chitkia | Premium. Under this new approach, ads will be displayed to readers who get to your site by search AND to others who some statistical techniques have predicted are more likely to click on ads.

Impact for Blogger users and readers.

On Mon 8 March 2010, all existing Chitka | Premium ads will be upgraded to Chitika | Select - unless you opt-out of this by logging in to your account, going in to the My Account tab, and ticking the option(s) at the very bottom of the page.

Chitika account settings - options for not showing ads to non-search traffic, and not showing banner or image ads

Your US and Canada readers may start to see more ads:

Whether or not the do depends on their behaviour (and I'm guessing it will take a while to work out what sort of factors mean that people are predicted by be ad-clickers).
Worst-case, seeing more ads could convince more readers to install ad-blocker software.

Some ads (but not all of them) may look different - we don't have any details about this yet, and I'd guess won't until 8 March at least.

The announcements say that Chitika | Select ads will include both pay-per-click and pay-per-impression (CPM) banner and image ads, but they don't actually say whether the latter are a new feature being introduced with Select or not. The way that the opt-out feature is presented makes me think that they're probably new, though.

What's not changing:

Readers who

didn't get to the blog by searching, and
who also aren't included in the group that Select ads are shown to

will continue to not see any Chitika ads: the ad-space simply collapses, without showing anything else or displaying alternative ads

The alternative-ads feature will continue to work for Chitika Premium ads, but it wont' be there for Select.

There are some other Chitika products apart from Premium, but they're more focussed to shopping sites, so probably not used by Blog-spot users, and they don't appear to be affected.

For now, Chitika Select is only available for US/Canada readers. They say that the technology introduced behind Select will let them change this in the future, but it's not changing for now.