Chitika Audited Revenue Rip-Off

Posted on 1/12/2005 by Ingoal

So, today was the day that I had access to audited revenue stats for the first time since I switched over to Chitika and to keep it short: I’m shocked!

It’s not only the major cut, but the unprofessional way this whole thing is being handled:

It’s quite normal that a certain percentage will be taken away from the unaudited click stats (usually around 10-15%), but I never heard from cuts of 95% percent before
Why do you cheat people by showing ads for a month and then not paying anything for it?
IMO if you’re displaying ads to untargeted/unwanted visitors (people from countries who aren’t supported) then it’s up to you to pay for it…especially if you’re not providing a mechanism to not show ads to those users! – On another note: chitika just provided the user with this mechansim through alternative urls…but that’s two months too late, at least for me!

So, I’m stuck with ad revenue that is 5% of the original showed revenue for October (yes the cut with my sites was 95%! :-( )…and now I can wait for another month to see the results for November…this isn’t right and I’m really about to pull all their ads from all my sites immediatly – then wait for the November revenue to be clear (end of the year) and then see what will happen?!
Or what’s your plan of action? Serve another month worth of ads for (next to) nothing?

(More about this topic can be found on numerous sites, including: George B., Jason Golod, JenSense).

Update:
After calculating everything and trying to read up as much as possible on this whole mess if come up with some conclusions which I put up as a comment to Darren’s Reaction on the whole issue.

Here’s what I had to say:

My comment on Problogger:

Alrighty, after venting earlier on in one of my posts if had another look at the whole situation and have been reading up on it too. I guess the quoted 90% is a quote from my post in this sitepoint thread
(http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322419&highlight=chitika)…and after recalculating everything I can say that the cut was an exact 96,28%. In another context I would be really proud to be quoted all over the blogosphere, but not in this case as you can imagine.

My conclusion (without having any insight into the inner workings of the audit process) the following things are sure IMO:

My sites don’t receive invalid clicks in the common sense (or at least nothing out of the ordinary)

I’ve optimized the ads as best as possible using the hints of you, Darren, and other experts.

There’s a good possibility that there are >1 clicks per IP as I’ve got many returning visitors (daily)…so they will be substracted…okay.

The main chunk of the substracted clicks would have to be clicks from unsupported countries (if I can trust Google Analytics) a rough estimation would be 50% unique visitors from US + Europe, the other 50% ranging from South America, China, and the Mideast – and I guess these are all considered “invalid” and substracted.

So, if you combine 3. + 4. I guess that you can cut the unaudited numbers in half, maybe even chop of 60%…that said: substract another “usual 10%” and you’re near the true numbers I’m looking at.

So, does this make the situation any better for me? Not really, but at least I know what’s going on now…although it’s a little bit weird to put on the sherlock holmes hat and go “fact hunting” to get behind this…especially if you’re looking at an ad-provider like chitika who doesn’t support you in the whole process left alone in the whole “audit scandal”…on a brighter note: now that they’ve done their homework (with the whole alternative ad functionality) it’s possible that the numbers will be more real-life than fiction…although this is still no excuse for two months of served ads without proper payment (after all november is already down the drain as I think the cut will be similiar right there).

Bottom line:

Don’t let your customers (in this case the publishers) in the dark for two months or at least stop wondering why there’s all this uproar everywhere and try to explain the situation (why do they have a blog again?)

Work on a quick solution of more uptodate stats (if not daily then at least weekly)

If you can’t handle all the buzz, don’t take on all those publishers just to leave them back unsatisfied!

One additional thought: I embedded the whole “alternative ad url” thing into most of my sites and I’m going to keep the eMiniMalls up and running for now…although I’ve signed up with BrightAds and Clicksor in an effort to balance my ad-streams…

Roundup 25.11.2005

Posted on 25/11/2005 by Ingoal

Busy times, so not many posts in recent days. I’m the the middle of building up my domain-portfolio and I picked up a dedicated server (as mentioned in an earlier post) along the way, which was giving me all sorts of problems. The most urgent problem was the “small amount” of bandwidth included (“only” 200 GB) which were gone pretty quickly. So I had a decision to make: either stick with this server and pay additional fees for the traffic over the limit (probably each and every month) or switch to a bigger server with more bandwith included. I decided to go with the latter and ordered the following beast last week:

Opteron 146 (2.0 GHz, 64bit, 1000 FSB, 1MB Cache)
1GB Ram
2x 160GB HDD
Emergency remote console
Unlimited bandwidth (or should I say unmetered as there truely is no such thing as an unlimited connection)

Then I was stuck with the next problem: after waiting for a week and seeing the old server hit way over the bandwidth limit I contacted support about the status of the server. Sure enough they are backloged on this particular server and it could be another two weeks until the new server arrived. Groovy, not! So I told support that I was totally NOT satisfied with this and they offered me an interim server (without charge) and I accepted. So now some of the more resource consuming sites (Proxytastic, etc) are located on the interim server (AMD Athlon 64 3200+).

As for new sites:
After the success of Proxytastic.com I decided to add two more similiar sites to the network:

FreeWebProxy.org using the PHProxy script
TheCGIProxy.com using the CGI Proxy script

Fantasy footie:
Well, it seems that I’m slowly and steadily catching up with Mr. Price’s SPAM AND CHEESE XI squad…go INVINCIBLES RELOADED!

Mr. Price’s score: 31 pts (411 total)
Ingoal’s score: 35 pts (392 total)

Dedicated server update

Posted on 8/11/2005 by Ingoal

As mentioned in an earlier post I was thinking hard about getting myself a dedicated server, especially for one of my new sites: Proxytastic.com. I did so and everything went quite well, although the hosting company wanted me to transfer the domains I wanted to use on the server over to them – not a good idea IMO. So I went back and forth with their technical support to no avail.

…and just as I was about to transfer at least one domain over I thought: why not ask my fellow SitePoint Forums Advisors/Mentors for help? So I did and right away Jason Sweat was right on the money with his hint: use ZoneEdit.com! I did and everything seems to be up and running – finally.

If you encounter any problems with Proxytastic.com it could be that the DNS update isn’t yet fully propagated…

Ingoal’s Rating:

Product Name: Strato Power Server
Cost: 19.90 Euro / month
AMD Sempron 2200
512MB Ram
60GB HDD (in my case 80GB :-) )
Price/Performance index (so far): 5/5
Customer Service index – quickness: 1/5
Customer Service index – helpfulness: 1/5

I guess the old saying is true: you get what you pay for – in my case a nice little server along with not so nice customer support…although I can’t really blame them for their policies (domains need to be transfered to them if you want to use their nameservers) – after all their trying to make a buck or two, too ;-)

Server outage

Posted on 6/11/2005 by Ingoal

I just wanted to let you know that there was a major server problem earlier which caused this blog (along with all of my other sites) to be down for some hours. There was something wrong with the mounting of the hard-drives so the home shares couldn’t be mapped to the domains. Everything seems to be up and running again though and the customer support responded within an hour…so I’m not totally happy, but at least relieved to see the sites all up and running again…

On another note: I decided to get myself a dedicated server for the likes of Proxytastic.com as they’re too resource hungry to be run on this shared hosting account. Watch out for an announcement once the dedicated server is up and running….

Update:…and another server outage, this time the DB server…this is starting to get annoying…

Second Update:Support got to it, although it was sunday morning quite quickly…the db server was filled up…now it’s been trimmed down to around 80% of it’s capacity, but it seems that they need another storage solution or something for this particular server…so…for now everything up and running again…

Live Poker Reloaded

Posted on 6/11/2005 by Ingoal

So, we went at it again tonight with a huge turnout of 11 players this time. So 11 x 10 Euro equals a pot of 110 Euro. As prior losers were feeling sad (and rightly so) due to our “winner takes it all” approach we decided to split the pot tonight:

First place: 70 Euro
Second place: 30 Euro
Third place: 10 Euro

We started with two tables (one 6 player table and one 5 player table) and decided that the final 6 would make the final table for the pot. I was located at the 6 player table and survived the elimination round to goto the final table with roughly 25 Euro. I was able to hold on to my chips almost until the end and I made the bubble. As soon as I knew that I was in the money I decided to play chances and busted out in 3rd place – paying out my 10 Euro buy-in…so nothing gained nothing lost…alrighty. Bianca (the only woman in our poker round) held on to her chip lead and busted out Thomas in second place to walk away with the second biggest payout of our recent tournaments: 70 Euro.

As it was rather early (1am) we decided to play another round with a lower buy-in: 5 Euro. I played along with 6 other players and we decided that it was time for a winner takes it all style match. I survived until the end, but busted out on the short stack when my 10-7 was outdrawn by a K-5…so another 2nd place to my statistics….

Bottom Line: played live poker all night and went out with 5 Euro less than I started with, but with two final tables (and finals – the last players to battle for the money) to my record…not a bad way to finish a saturday night – although I would have loved to take at least one pot…but hey, I don’t complain and there’s always another rematch sometime in the near future ;-)

Time to get a dedicated server?

Posted on 5/11/2005 by Ingoal

Well, after the launch of my newest site (Proxytastic.com) which was supposed to deliver a free webbased proxy for people who are unable to access certain sites from the workplace or school I find myself unable to keep it up as I’m getting constant warnings of the admins of my hoster (Dreamhost) that the resource usage (namely CPU time used) is way to high for a shared server.

I guess this is true, because such a site is just a resource hog when it comes to cpu usage and believe me, I tried every major (free) solution (PHProxy, CGI Proxy,…) – to no effect. Now I’m faced with the question: Should I shell out some major cash to get me a dedicated server or not? While I would love to have my own box (and cpu for that matter) I’m not to keen on paying another bill every month, especially due to the fact that I’m totally satisfied with my current hosting (Dreamhost) and it’s provided service in respect to the asked price (on another note: I already payed one year in advance with a major rebate). Decisions, decisions. For now I’ve taken the script off the server to avoid getting more techical support mails in my inbox although it hurts me as the site was really picking up traffic really fast (around 900-1000 uniques per day) – maybe I should have a closer look at the income (ads) the site might bring me and consider getting a dedicated or managed server…

Question to the readers: do you have any experience with dedicated servers (hopefully positive ones) and can get me a recommendation for a provider? (Currently I’m looking at offers from the major german providers (like 1&1 and Strato) with servers starting as low as 19.99 Euro/month (for a Sempron 2200+ machine – although I’m not sure how good this would be for one, not to say many, resource hogging site(s))

Roundup…

Posted on 29/10/2005 by Ingoal

Thursday:

Sox time again! After the Red Sox last year, the White Sox did it this year. They won the World Series 4-0 over the Houston Astros to win their first World Series in 88 years! Congrats!
I visited the Systems World in Munich. Quite interesting especially some digital office solutions (ELO, etc). On another note: I saw the new Audi Q7 there. Oooh this one looks sweet, but is “sligthly” out of my price range…
No Poker for the second day in a row…after being on the road for most of the day I just didn’t feel like playing…

Friday:

After getting some more sleep than on thursday I used the afternoon to play some tournaments again. I declare Q-Q to be my downfall…from now on I’m going to lay it down preflop as this is the hand that has kicked me out of a tournament three times now :-(
In the evening I went to footie training (the first week I’ve been able to train twice in quite a while), which was fun as we did less running and more playing.

Update…

Posted on 6/10/2005 by Ingoal

Alrighty, I’m back.

Uni stuff:

“Marathon sessions” payed off, our uni document was ready just in time to goto the copy shop to be binded as a small book; handed in on time :tup:
Exams are over, for now. Yesterday was the big day: Wissensverarbeitung (knowledge engineering) + Verteilte Systeme (Distributed Systems). Did go quite well, at least in knowledge engineering, don’t really know about Distributed Systems, but hey…I’ll find out in some weeks…glad that it’s over ;-)

Fantasy footie:

Not a particularly good week again, but I’m still keeping touch to the top…

Mr. Price’s score this week: 46 points (270 points total) – currently in 2nd place
Ingoal’s score this week: 32 points (249 points total) – currently in 6th place

FC Marbach II:
I didn’t attend the match vs Hochdorf on sunday due to my exam preparation, but I know the result: FC Marbach II 4-1 SGV Hochdorf :-)

Health:
I picked up a nasty cold sometime last week, so it was hard to concentrate on the exam preparation, the exam itself and all the other tasks. Now that this is all behind me, I’m taking some time off to really get better and it’s paying off already – after the first decent night’s sleep in a while I’m feeling better already, today. God bless medicine :-)

Politics:
It seems that weeks after our general elections the big parties are finally converging into a settlement…maybe we’ll have a new chancellor sooner than we all thought. I’m really curious whether it’s going to be Angela Merkel (CDU) or Gerhard Schroeder (SPD – current chancellor) or a third person (!).

Backup day!

Posted on 25/8/2005 by Ingoal

A quick scare this morning: we had a short but total power outage this morning – not a biggie, unless your pc is running 24/7 (mine is acting as fax-server and all) :rolleyes:
Too bad that I don’t have a UPS for this computer anymore as it broke months ago and I just don’t feel like spending major bucks on a state-of-the-art one yet again (I’m not a big fan of Line-Interactive UPSs).

The pc wouldn’t boot up as the primary hdd refuse to spin, luckily enough it came alive after some reboots :tup:

That’s when it hit me: the last backup of my business stuff is more than 3 months old :eek: , so first thing I did was a dvd-backup and an off-site backup (encrypted on one of my private ftp-servers).

So I declare this day to be backup day! …and even more important: I’m looking around for an automated script-type backup to do an automatic off-site backup regularly from now on ;-)

Round up

Posted on 18/8/2005 by Ingoal

Well, well, it’s been a while since my last post – I’m sort of really busy these days…

Fantasy Footie:

Premiere League: I’m playing in the Daily Telegraph’s Fantasy Football League again (link). There are many prices up for grabs and I guess it’s going to be fun to compete against Joe again…same bet as last year: the one who scores more points over the course of the season will receive a free account for the next season (so far it’s 1-1, Joe won last season, I won the season before the last season).
German league: I’m playing in a private online game again…so far I’m in midfield, let’s see if I can get into the price ranges this year (places 1-15 out of 100)

Uni:
I’m in the middle of a learning spree as the exams are coming mighty fast (mid September and early October). Apart from that I’m trying to get in gear with our research project.

Online stuff:
I’m trying to get some new projects off the ground and it’s really hard to get the time together to really work on things…

ImageUploads.info is completed and is slowly picking up a user base…nothing more to do, at least for now.
Crown-Mail.com is completed, although I’m not totally satisfied with the slicing of the images, needs some final touch-ups…
Blogtastic – the final goal of the site is to act as a reference for available blogsoftware as well as a discussion place for bloggers, curious “non-bloggers” and who knows what else…needs a lot of work…
Ingoal Network – I’ve got so many different sites now, but they’re not “under one roof”, so the Ingoal Network would be just that, a housing for all my sites…the domain has been with me for quite a long time, but I didn’t get around to do anything with it yet…hopefully that’ll change soonish…

Today:
The Pope, our very own Joseph Ratzinger, Benedikt XVI. is in Germany. I’m just watching the tv coverage and you gotta be amazed. Whether you are a believer or not, it’s just amazing to see how many people are moved by a single person!

Yesterday in court…

Posted on 27/7/2005 by Ingoal

Yesterday was a really emotional day. I went to court to witness the revision of last year’s trial (short summary: a drunken driver hit and killed my mate Sascha Himmelsbach on December 9th 2002 – he was on his way to uni that day and couldn’t do anything about the accident…the accident assessor calculated that there were 0.7 seconds of possible reaction time from the time that the drunken bastard started to skid until he hit the car of my mate :( )…he was sentenced to 22months in jail in the last trial, which took place in May 2004, but he appealed, so yesterday the revision took place.

After hours and hours of story telling and lying (or at least stretching the truth) he was once again sentenced…this time to 16months in jail. I guess it’s impossible to make up for killing someone, but 16months and some insurance money doesn’t sound right to me – but what can you do, you gotta take what you get.

I really hope that this is the end of this (once again he could appeal because it was a new trial)…as it’s hard to see the guy walking around free for over 2 years now although he’s been sentenced once and now a second time.

Sascha Himmelsbach, 18.08.1978-09.12.2002
Gone, but never forgotten!

Busy weekend

Posted on 17/7/2005 by Ingoal

Oooh what a weekend. Went out to play Golf for the first time ever on friday and it was really fun! I could really like it. We went to the GolfClub Niederreutin which is so beautiful you couldn’t even imagine. As we were mostly beginners (some mates have played before, some haven’t) we went straight to the driving range and tried to get our swing going – tbh it does seem so easy when you look at the Golf Pros on the telly, but believe me it isn’t. Nontheless we didn’t do all that bad and were able to even hit some good shots with the Woods (W1/W3/W5) in the end. To finish up our golf experience we visited the chipping/putting area and had a little fun there. All in all a really good experience – I guess this won’t be the only time we were playing ;-)

After the Golf experience we headed off to play a little private poker round which started at midnight and lasted until around 10am on saturday morning – I split the main pot with my mate Armin in the end…so noone was really disappointed.

After that it was time for a little brunch and some chillin’ on the couch…about 2pm it was finally time to take a nap – and after a good nights sleep the weekend is almost over again. Time to regroup and head off into the first week after the semester:

Exams are coming up in September/October, so still enough time to get the learning on it’s way…besides that it’s time to start our “Fachstudie” (a team of 3 students are analyzing something over the course of 3 months) – we’re covering the topic “BPEL4WS vs. WS-CDL in different scenarios”. This should really be fun and a good way to deepen our knowledge about Web Service Technolgy!

Shopping spree – Part 2

Posted on 27/4/2005 by Ingoal

Just couldn’t resist: 512MB DDR400 ram module…just under 40 Euro… :mrgreen:

Now my main machine is finally running with 1 GB ram, not a major improvement, but I’m already starting to feel a slight improvement – I’m a sucker for multitasking, so there are always numerous programs running at a time…so the more the merrier :wink:

Hurghada, Egypt

Posted on 21/4/2005 by Ingoal

So, it’s been nearly one week since I returned from my vacation and I promised to write a little something about it. Now I’ve got a little spare time on my hands so here it goes:

I stayed at the beautiful Reemyvera Hotel, which is a 4star hotel.

Rooms: spacious as single rooms are double-bed rooms (the hotel online has double bed rooms)
Food: buffet with Fish, beef, chicken, rice, potatoes, etc – very tasty, altough it’s hard to get accustomed to rice as side dish every day…
Beach: lovely, especially as the beach is only 1 minute from the room and there a comfortable beach couches along with sun shades and a lovely beach bar
Other guests:Mostly russian, young and attractive :wink:, altough some noisy kids and (almost) alcoholics round up the picture…
People:All the guys serving you (cleaning the rooms, getting your beach towels, serving you drinks) are very friendly and make you feel right at home

So, what else did I see besides the hotel? Did a day trip to Luxor visiting the Valley of Kings, the Karnak temple and Hatschepsut temple. After a 4,5h bus ride we arrived at the Valley of Kings and it was a really hot day, so the air in the tombs wasn’t all that good…it was really interesting to see all the art on the walls and ceilings…the only let-down: the whole thing is really overrun with tourists (d’oh!) and the total time we spent there was only around an hour while visiting three tombs – all emptied by tomb raiders years ago…

After the Valley of Kings we visited alabaster stone factory (can you say: buy, buy, buy something)…before we continued our trip to the Hatschepsut temple which is really a monumental thing…carved half out of a massive rock, it was one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve seen yet. After having the chance to take pictures and stroll around a little we moved on to the shore of the river Nile to make a little boat trip. We rode on the Nile for about 15minutes until we arrived at the Luxor Hilton where we had lunch.

After lunch it was back to the bus again and off to the Karnak Temple…which is one of the biggest things I’ve ever seen…obelisks, pillars about 10m high, and all sorts of different figures of different Pharaohs…a really interesting and big site.

After that (it was already late afternoon) we headed of to a “Papyrus museum” (can you say: buy, buy, buy please)…to make our guide happy (and not get him fired) we all had a little look around before getting back on the bus…

Then it was of to the staging area where we waited almost an hour before the convoy of around 80 busses began it’s return to Hurghada – escorted by Army and police. I’ve never ever seen such a huge amount of police (with automated weapons – tommy gun) and military (with automated weapons – Kalashnikov aka AK-47). All crossings, bridges and small streets along our way were blocked by police/military until the convoy had passed – just like it was in the morning…I don’t even wanna know how much bakshisch the travel agencies are paying for that…we came back to the hotel at 11pm…a really long, but interesting day…

We discarded the idea of doing another day trip to Kairo as the would have picked you up at 1am and you would have returned at 11pm (if not later) in the evening…after doing a 8-9h drive to Kairo and a 8-9h drive from Kairo – you can calc for yourself how much time would have been left to visits the pyramids and the egyptian museum…

We spent the remaining week totally relaxing at the beach all day…only downside of the whole vacation was the flight (we booked Stuttgart – Hurghada, Hurghada – Stuttgart and flew Stuttgart – Duesseldorf – Hurghada, Hurghada – Duesseldorf – Stuttgart) which was a real bugger…nontheless it was really great to have a vacation (my first since greece 2002)…

Now I can add “Africa” to the “continents visited”…
(I’ll try to post some photos asap…)

Go shorty, it’s your birthday…

Posted on 17/4/2005 by Ingoal

…we’re going to party like it’s your birthday… :mrgreen:

Well, well, well…so it’s my birthday today, so don’t expect to many updates (they will follow over the course of next week)…27…now it’s only “little time” till 30 :shock:

Ingoal's Insight…

…or bloggin' the day away!

Category Archives: personal babbling