Blog Notes: reCAPTCHA and Chitika

Six Apart released a major new version of Movable Type this week. Movable Type has powered this blog since February of 2003, and it’s still the best blogging tool out there. Most of the changes in this new version were under the hood, so it’ll take some time for all that new technology to filter down into the blog. We’ll definitely be adding some of the social networking features that MT 4.2 offers.

It’s been over six months since I first wrote about reCAPTCHA. In that time, it has pretty much completely stopped comment spam. It’s been very effective. Once in a while a spammer leaves a comment by hand, but having one a month instead of 100 or 1,000 a day to deal with is a drastic improvement. reCAPTCHA works, and it also does useful work at the same time. The one thing it doesn’t do is manage trackback spam. Trackbacks have been turned off for a while on Manufactured Environments, simply because too much junk was getting past the spam filters.

One of the new announcements for MT 4.2 was the release of a freely available anti-spam system similar to Akismet called TypePad AntiSpam. reCAPTCHA has been so effective with comments, that it will probably continue to protect this blog. But I would like to turn trackbacks back on, and perhaps this new anti-spam measure will be effective enough to try that.

The other new thing I’ve been trying out on the blog is a service called Chitika, which is a full service advertising network. I received an invite in my email, and it seems to be something that will add some value for certain users of this site. I’m trying the Chitika Premium service, which can work alongside Google AdSense. So I’ve left my AdSense ads as they are. The Chitika unit only shows when a U.S. user shows up at this blog from a search engine. The unit contains two tabs. The first lists ads for the person’s search terms, and it even lists the search terms in the header. The second tab is a search tab. So instead of showing ads based on the content of my page, as Google AdSense does, Chitika shows ads based on the search terms that a person used at a search engine to arrive at my site.

So if the display criteria is not met, the ad unit does not appear. So in that sense it is rather unobtrusive. My regular readers won’t be bothered by any additional advertising, while transient travelers, will have a targeted ad. I experimented a bit with the different sizes until I found one that fit best with the layout of my pages. It’s a non-standard ad size, but I’m happy with it – it’s a short, wide block that is visible without being too intrusive.

With the level of traffic, it seems to be earning about what I expected. So far this month it has pulled in about $10 or $11 so far. That’s in addition to the $40 or so I earn a month from AdSense. Not enough to quit my day job, but it definitely pays for the web hosting bill. I’ll need to see Chitika in action for a few months to see how much it cuts into AdSense revenue and whether it makes up for that. My sense so far is that it does end up earning more than with just AdSense alone.