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Online advertising or rather, the irritating and ubiquitous banner ads on top of every webpage has received a shot in the arm. As reported by NY Times, “Chitika, an advertising company based in Marlborough, Mass., began testing eMiniMalls, a technology that scans a Web page, chooses a product the reader might be interested in, and then displays banner ads that are miniature shopping comparison pages, with prices, product reviews and links to merchants.” Interesting, Venkat Kolluri, chief executive of Chitika has partnered his company with Shopping.com that gives him enough credibility and coverage to make significant changes to online advertising. He also claims that “his” banner ads generate clicks from at least 1% of the visitors as compared to the industry average of less than 1%. When I first read about Chitika, I wondered how different it was from Google’s Adsense. Corey Jeffery, an analyst from Nielsen/NetRatings also has similar concerns and warns Chitika to “keep an eye in their rearview mirror." However, Google won’t think twice before cracking down on Chitika if they feel that they are making a dent in their market.
I am not sure if users will notice these ads but as long as they remain irritating and flash out bright colors, we will be likely to install ad blockers. I hardly see any ads in my browser these days, thanks to the Ad Block extension in FireFox (bolstered by Filterset G). If you notice anything different in your banner ads, Chitika might be at work.
by Patrix | on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 2:00 am | 
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July 13th, 2005 at 8:05 pm reply
Adblock is the second best thing invented for net after web-based emails… er.. wait, there is porn too..
July 14th, 2005 at 8:30 am reply
Thanks for the Filterset G link
I already have a filters file which is being updated since past one year, and is quite robust.
But Filterset G is even more complete