Million Dollar Experiment – Chitika Earnings Revealed Plus a Surprise

I recently contacted Chitika to make sure it was OK for me to publicly reveal how much I’m earning from their eMiniMalls program, since I wanted to share this data as part of the Million Dollar Experiment. They told me it was OK to do so, but I couldn’t reveal more detailed stats like the click-through rate since it would violate their Terms of Service. This is good news, since it means I’m free to share this data with you.

$49 from Chitika

I just started showing the Chitika ads on November 1st, and my first three days of earnings brought in $0.98, $15.72, and $32.36 in commissions. The first two days I was still setting up the ads, so the third day is probably the most accurate in terms of what to expect from ongoing daily revenue. Even though it’s too early to make accurate estimates, I’m guessing this program will generate about an extra $1000/month in revenue. That’s not as good as Adsense does for me, but so far it doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing Adsense revenue at all, so it’s a whole new income stream.

Chitika has a process where they “audit” your clicks at the end of each month to remove duplicate and fraudulent clicks, so the actual revenue you get will be a little lower than the unaudited earnings reported. I’ve heard from others that the auditing process will reduce revenue by around 10-20%, but I’ll have to wait until the end of the month to find out how this site fares. I’ll just adjust my total figures downward for the purposes of this experiment once the auditing takes place. This appears to be a reputable company as far as I can tell, so I’m not worried about eventually getting paid. Otherwise, I’d hold off on accounting for the revenue until I’d actually received it.

Furthermore, I’ve also had several people sign up for Chitika via my referral, and some are already displaying ads on their own sites. And in other news, Google Adsense just announced its own affiliate program where they pay $100 for each new client you refer them (after the client has earned $100 in commissions).

So these new sources of revenue should easily put an extra $10,000 in my pocket over the next year, probably a lot more than that as traffic continues to grow. Isn’t it amazing how technology creates pathways for earning an extra $10,000+ per year with just a few minutes work? Of course, you obviously have to lay some groundwork first. But it’s these kinds of exciting opportunities that leave me completely disinterested in ever having a regular job, as I’ll discuss further in today’s upcoming podcast.

$728 from individual ad sales

In other news I also sold some ads to an individual ad buyer today. This isn’t something I normally do at all — it’s definitely out of the ordinary for me. A couple days ago (shortly after kicking off the MDE experiment), I was contacted by an interested advertiser who wanted to purchase some text link ads. I get such emails frequently and usually just delete them because they’re typically from sites I wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting. This one initially seemed a poor fit for my content as well, but instead of trashing the email, I hesitated for a moment and then ended up sending the person a quick reply just to clarify their request (or so I rationalized to myself), so I could feel a little more certain that trashing it was the right thing to do. I’m not sure why, but my intuition just hinted that this one was different. Well, to make a long story short, we both saw the potential for a win-win deal, and we were quickly able to work out an arrangement. This whole process ended up taking just minutes worth of my time (probably about 10-20 minutes total), and a couple hours ago I received a PayPal transfer of $750.

So not only did this advertiser come to me completely unsolicited, but I also had to follow my intuition to make it happen. This was an opportunity that didn’t even exist when I began the experiment only three days ago. If I hadn’t been tuned into looking for unexpected sources of income as a result of this experiment, there’s no way this deal would have occurred. On the one hand, it’s great to take advantage of a new opportunity like this. But on the other hand, I’m starting to become an inverse paranoid, wondering if there aren’t many other sources of great value-for-value exchanges that I’ve been missing out on simply because I wasn’t tuned in to them. I’m beginning to see that simply expecting abundance to come into my life might actually be the very means of attracting it.

When you subtract the PayPal commission of $22, that puts my running total from this experiment at $777 ($750-22+49). That’s funny because 777 is considered a lucky number here in Las Vegas. It’s a winning combination on slot machines, and many hotels and businesses here have phone numbers that start with 777. For example, the Las Vegas Tourist Bureau’s phone number is 1-800-777-VEGAS. Is this some sort of sign that I’m on the right track?

Did this extra money come to me as a result of pure coincidence? I think I can readily dismiss that possibility, since I certainly had a hand in actively manifesting it. Was it caused by this experiment programming my subconscious to be more attuned to hidden financial opportunities, which helped guide me to take different actions? Maybe… for now that seems a valid possibility. Or is there some superconscious force at work that created a non-local resonance between this advertiser and myself which allowed us to quickly and smoothly work out a win-win deal in less than 48 hours?

Your guess is as good as mine. But I can think of 777 reasons to continue this experiment. 😉