Adding Chitika Ads - Pretty Simple!

Google Adsense has one major restriction in their Terms of Service (TOS) that you must honor if you are going to use them. While you are allowed to have other ads on your pages alongside Adsense ads, you are not allowed to use other contextual ads. That is, ad networks that determine what ads to show depending on what they perceive as the content of the page.

On ProductCritic, we have small Amazon affiliate ad on the left panel that is directly targeted to the product review being displayed. That is allowed under the Adsense TOS because we set the appropriate Amazon ASIN for that product (the ad itself doesn't figure out what product to show just by looking at the page).

We had always planned to add Chitika ads to the site as it fits with the products and allows us to provide prices without having to create a whole pricing engine...especially since many other sites already do that well. Chitika ads also fit with the core purpose of ProductCritic in that it helps people make the smartest and most informative decisions (on both quality and pricing) before making a purchase.

Finally, Chitika ads adhere to the Adsense TOS because they are not context sensitive. The Chitika scripts are very easy to understand though so it's quite easy for us (via Ruby code) to assign the right product category and product to the Chitika ad script so that the correct product shows up on each page.

I'll write a post in the future about how the new Chitika ads are working on the site.