In 2003, co-founders Venkat Kolluri and Alden DoRosario started Chitika after leaving their jobs at search engine-based company Lycos.

[2] In 2015, Chitika's founders announced Cidewalk, their local mobile ad platform, would spin off into a separate business unit with $4 Million in seed funding and new office space in Southborough, MA.

[14] On March 16, 2011, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appeared before the United States Senate Commerce Committee and announced its first behavioral advertising case, filed against Chitika for use of a deceptive opt-out mechanism.

Further, the settlement required that Chitika link all its advertising to an effective opt-out mechanism in future.

It has been commented that, “this requirement of a hyperlink embedded in online advertisements is a good indicator of the type of Do Not Track mechanism that will be acceptable to the FTC if “Do Not Track” becomes mandatory.”[16] According to a press release by the company, their opt-out cookies have been set to ten days since March 2010 when the FTC began their investigation.

[17] Chitika subsequently claimed to have made only a total of fifty-five cents from the ten-day opt-out expiration.