PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

[ZOX]

Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread!

 

[Mike]

I went from checking my stats a few times every hour to hardly wanting to log in at all.
This pay period I'm at a whopping $5 ... i remember days where it was well in the 4 digits by now... depressing doesn't even begin to describe my feelings..

M.

 

[winst]

I went from checking my stats a few times every hour to hardly wanting to log in at all.
This pay period I'm at a whopping $5 ... i remember days where it was well in the 4 digits by now... depressing doesn't even begin to describe my feelings..

M.

Wow, 4 digits and now only $5, that was a big drop! I've collecting domain names for a while, but only started to do parking 3 years ago. I only broke even last year, and now that my portfolio is profitable, it is no where near where my day job makes. I had high hopes for parking, but it was not as easy as I thought.

 

[advaita]

That's a horrendous drop Mike - were you getting the visitors from arbitrage before ?

 

[Mike]

That's a horrendous drop Mike - were you getting the visitors from arbitrage before ?

Yep, primarily. Which gets to show that arbitrage did convert well. If users hadn't found what they were looking for, they wouldn't have clicked on a single link. From 300% ROI to ... $5 :lol:
Anyways, it's yesterday's pain. Arbitrage at Parked is dead and it seems that it won't be coming back anytime soon. As well as Google has yet again understood to make our life's more miserable by their recent changes in how clients can choose their ad placement.
Considering the bigger picture, we all stand to loose more than ever before. Including the parking companies. The ones that will come out ahead are the hosting companies, as it seems that developing is the last frontier.

However, i'm banking on Donny's/Parked.com's ingenuity to develop a platform to overcome the current obstacles.

M.

 

[TheWatcher]

It's too bad, I slowly feel the pain with parking services including my revenue in Parked despite the fact I don't have arbitrage advertising. It's a domino effect from google to parking to domainer.

Well I decided to develop them one by one, building a programmer club within my network to develop our domains.

Instead of waiting, we just started our forum domain e.g. www.multiforums.com as pilot development, then other domain to follow.

“Even if you think you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” (Will Rogers)

 

[jooster]

I jsut applied for a parked.com account, I have some great domains and entered just 10 of my 2500, not to mention my partners 25,000

I got turned down because the names were not what they were looking for. names like skin-treatment.com londonbridge.com, if these don't work then I don't know what will.

I have replied to ask what was wrong with my names but no reply back to me as yet.

Shame, they looked like they could have been better than trafficz and sedo

 

[Mike]

Jooster - sent you a PM.

M.

 

[thetruman]

is around a week time I am receiving just clicks of 4, 3, 2 , 1 cents (and lower like 4 clicks and 2c revenue).
This is getting weird

 

[goodkarmaco]

Intel makes some good points and its possible Parked can come up with something.

My view though is parking companies have seen this stuff coming for way longer than we have. if they don't have anything better to offer by now then we are in a shithole.

Even the issue of transparency and profits getting down to domainers has not been implemented. When the house is burning the main thing to do is save what you can. When the smoke clears whats left is whats left.

The time for water sprinklers to save the house should have been installed way before people move in.

 

[Mike]

This is NOT specific to Parked.com - yet it fits the industry.

I think the following can be seen as a blanket statement covering ALL parking providers:

"It's an industry primed to be reactive not proactive."

The only standards that have ever been set by a parking company were within the parking industry, but never outside. Not once has there been an initiative to change the winds in our favor. If there had been, it would have been publicized as our (the domainer) assistance would proof to be a HIGHLY useful tool.

So far, the parking companies and subsequently we, the domainers, have always been 2 steps behind.
...and before anyone asks how I would propose to change that? Tons of suggestions, but as this is a business, none of them comes for free at this point. I (we) have been robbed of enough to continue handing out freebies.

M.

 

[thetruman]

well said Mike... but...what next? :td:

 

[Shenron]

Well Well...

When I try to apply twice, with domains like:

genfinance.com
stockscentral.net
tradelive.net

+

4 domains with over 14 years, pagerank and traffic

+

a few other quality domains

And I get refused twice!!!

Do you actually think parked.com Biz model is still going strong?

**Maybe is just me wrong**

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

Parking is DEAD!

well said Mike... but...what next? :td:

It has become quite obvious over the past month or two that parking visitors are down, clicks are WAY down, and parking revenues are at rock bottom. This seems to be the case across most (if not all) parking companies.

As I said in an earlier post: some conversions from parked pages are "good" and some are "poor" - just like the conversions from "real pages". It depends on the niche and the mind set of the respective visitors. I will also venture to guess that the conversions from some parked pages are better than many "real pages" due to their CTR-optimized page designs.

If the advertisers would finally see that, we might see a partial reversal of this recent dramatic slump in parking revenues. Unless this happens, parking is dead as far as a revenue source. Unfortunately, I thing the Goog (and possibly the other major search players) has been implementing algorithms over the past few months to limit traffic and/or PPC revenues to parked pages - what else could explain this dramatic downturn across the board? - the visitor community hasn't really changed at all! So, we (and the advertisers) don't have a chance.

The future for us Domainers is our last bastion: mini-sites and full development. Also, I would not be surprised if the Goog figures out an algorithm to limit all but the cleverest of the former.

Unless, of course, Donny has an ace up his sleeve that we don't know about yet! We are rooting for Donny and Parked.com!!

Good luck to us all!

 

[rickkumar]

It's too bad, I slowly feel the pain with parking services including my revenue in Parked despite the fact I don't have arbitrage advertising. It's a domino effect from google to parking to domainer.

Well I decided to develop them one by one, building a programmer club within my network to develop our domains.

Instead of waiting, we just started our forum domain e.g. www.multiforums.com as pilot development, then other domain to follow.

“Even if you think you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” (Will Rogers)

Congrats on taking the right steps.....finally this has to be done or we will feel the pain forever and it will only get worse.

I am also doing a lot of research on various development systems such as joomla, wordpress, expressionweb, etc etc. My problem is I don't have any html/php/coding knowledge but I do have good project management knowledge. I am unable to decide which software to choose and take my first steps. Half of our portfolio is geo-targeted domains such as city+service.com

I will check you forums, and if you don't mind may ask you questions from time to time.

Again, good to see domainers taking the right steps....

 

[Donny]

Let me give an update on a few things and a few opinions. I met with Yahoo last week and arbitrage does not seem like it will be coming back anytime soon if it will ever come back.

In December, I planned out our entire year for Parked.com, including new major projects we were going to be working on and all of them were cool new features and improvements to our core products.

In January we were told that Ask had lost their contract to sub-syndicate to parking companies, but they had a plan, so we would be fine. We didn't like their plan so we went ahead and started working on our own internal solutions.

On February 11th or 12th, Yahoo contacted us and told us that arbitrage had to stop.

Ask didn't shock me, but Yahoo did. I thought Google should have pulled their feed from Ask a long time ago. It wasn't that Ask was doing anything wrong it was what some of their partners were doing. So I wasn't really shocked and this is why we already had somewhat of a plan together for this.

Yahoo shutting down arbitrage was a shock. Now I have a theory on why they shut it down, it's a crazy one, but it might really be the real reason. But first one of the many reasons Yahoo shut arbitrage down was because people were sending crap traffic to them. People sending 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tier PPC traffic which not always, but usually is pretty crappy. Sending traffic from Yahoo to Yahoo was another one. People having low TQ scores, who we should have terminated but we didn't. But that was then.

Something I thought about this weekend was that I forgot that we also had Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo. Obviously Yahoo and Google don't want Microsoft to buy Yahoo. So how do you make the offer worth way too much? Cut the revenue in half. So if Yahoo in mid quarter stops arbitrage, they make say 25% less than they did last quarter. Microsoft looks at the bid once the numbers are announced and walks away from the table. Yahoo could then come back and say let's start it back up. I know it's a far stretch, but I wouldn't doubt something like this would happen.

Did I mention how much money Google is losing right now because arbitrage doesn't exist anymore. WOW.

Donny

 

[larryharlow]

Did I mention how much money Google is losing right now because arbitrage doesn't exist anymore. WOW.

Donny

millions

 

[evilopinions]

Ask didn't shock me, but Yahoo did. I thought Google should have pulled their feed from Ask a long time ago. It wasn't that Ask was doing anything wrong it was what some of their partners were doing. So I wasn't really shocked and this is why we already had somewhat of a plan together for this.

Oh dear...

Now I see all the pieces falling together.It is indeed very clear.During our domainers meet in melbourne a lot of people confirmed the same suspicion of why Ask's feed was not renewed.I had this hint of doubt that "partners" may be one of the reason why Ask's feed was not renewed and now I know for sure why it was not renewed.

It is such a mess since Ask was in the market for so long and they had nothing close to competitive in terms of fraud management or similiar..

I dont want to point to any Partner as such as i have no proof but dont we all know who that "Partner" or "partners" is...Wasn't kicking us in the balls enough last year that now because of them we have to suffer some of the worst payout ever...

I am so sad that one of Parked competitior has affected Parked and its revenue so much...

 

[GILSAN]

Did I mention how much money Google is losing right now because arbitrage doesn't exist anymore. WOW.

Donny

Obviously its in the millions, but do you have an aproximate idea of how many millions or percentage wise what their loss is?

GIL

 

[goodkarmaco]

Well,

its offical, we are watching the s-it hit the fan.

Just like the world economy. First nobody believes it and we tend to trust those in authority. The first signs of any downturn is explained away by those in power, (everything is alright) as the fan starts whirling faster and faster we hear little tidbits of real truths, i.e. periods of instability in the future or "we will have to adjust".

Now it comes down to get out of the way or get covered with you know what, lol.

I do feel bad for parking owners who have built up small parking companies to be faced with these huge adjustments. I don't feel to bad for the very large parking companies. I could be wrong about this, but I feel they should have had more in store for domainers then this default, opps here it is.

 

[netmeg]

There's no magic bullet. Things change. It happens in every business, and every industry. Donny isn't going to ride up and come to our rescue, nor is it fair for us to put that hope or expectation on him - he's got his own fish to fry. We're all responsible for ourselves, and if we're going to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, we have to (each of us) figure out how to do it for ourselves.

I'm leaving my domains where they are (about half and half at parked and fab) - if they make money, that's great, if they don't, well, I bought them because I think they'll have a good resale value some day. And I'll cherry pick a few of the best ones and develop full blown sites for them. Fortunately I have around ten years HTML, PHP and MySQL experience. My main problem is lack of time.

Other than maybe making us feel better, it probably doesn't do a whole lot of good to keep dwelling on what's gone before. We should be talking about what we're going to do tomorrow, not what happened yesterday.

 

[jeffoverman]

Good points donny. Makes sense to me.

Glad you have more then one feed. Your pretty well covered I believe.

 

[netmeg]

Hey Donny - lately (by which I mean the last couple weeks) when I look at my daily statistics, how come every now and then there will be one or more domains listed that have no visits or clicks? I mean, in today's statistics, it normally only shows the ones that got visits. But for example, today I have one that has 0 visits, yet shows up in the stats.

 

[DnPresident]

Did I mention how much money Google is losing right now because arbitrage doesn't exist anymore. WOW.
Donny

Not that I've seen, What would be your guess? The most I've invested in top tier PPC advertisement in a month is approx $12,000 so I could only imagine what the big timers were doing. My guess would be that some people were spending $5,000-10,000 per day to make at least double or triple that amount. So I'd guess the top dogs were sending top tier SE traffic and Grossing $15,000-$30,000 per day on the return.

I only wish I would have been involved sooner.

Dave C.

 

[Mike]

Disclaimer: The following is my personal point of view as an individual - not as a NP Staff member.

Source: IntelBank

Google is loosing money - stocks are dropping - explanations at the next share holder meeting should be very interesting. Unfortunately, they can afford this type of business play.

Yahoo - whatever they've got up their sleeves, they seem to forget that, even if they artificially deflate their revenue and shy MSFT away from the table, they truly play into the hands of only ONE entity - GOOG.

If anyone falls for the illusion that GOOG would let YHOO back into the market - wake up and smell the roses.

GOOG is out to do one thing and one thing only - dominate the marketplace of the future, regardless of how many unethical tricks they have to play, how many jobs get cut, how many parking companies & domainers loose their revenue and definitely disregarding the advertisers dollars at the same time.

Unfortunately, the advertiser doesn't have much of a choice. Effective online advertising practically HAS to include GOOG's machinery in one way or another. This may be a fact that's completely to dislike, but definitely not to discredit.

GOOG's excuse? "It's the bigger picture." It's what's right in terms of user experience. If GOOG dislikes your content, whether this be a parked OR developed site, they'll slap you with a mystic algorithm and let you guess what you can do to truly improve your rankings or CPC values.
The bottom line; it's smoke and mirrors. There's only one true winner. It's not the advertiser, it's not the parking companies, it's definitely not us - it's GOOG. They have enough capital and blatant disregard to their investors to let their stocks decline to accomplish the mission of killing everyone else in the field. Logically, once the mission is accomplished, stocks will inevitably rise as there will be only limited competition.

Nothing new i'm telling anyone here. Even if you didn't consider it, once you lean back and really think about it, i'm actually just stating the obvious.

So, the question is. What's left to do? For one - quit using Google as a search engine. For another, stop all existing arbitrage and re-allocate to other providers. The only reasonable way, as illogical as it may sound, is to hurt them at their own game. Advertise, but advertise elsewhere. Search, but search elsewhere. Drop Adsense, get ads elsewhere.
One parking company, one domainer owner, one webmaster, one user at a time. After just a few weeks of combined re-allocation of funds, traffic and user behavior and the landscape might look a little bit different than it does today.

Yahoo? Not an obvious choice. Ask? Might be a contender. MSFT? Would be my personal pick. They are the in the top 3 and the only ones that can level the playing field, due to non GOOG influence. Other small ones? Possibly. Consider them a pool provider.

Now, in my own defense, maybe i shouldn't have had that bottle of Australian Red wine tonight but i firmly believe that the above presents a possible way to succeed and make some voices heard that GOOG notoriously decides to ignore.
To make it clear: I'm not talking boycott or trying to rally the troops, all i'm talking about is shifting weight. From the GOOG foot to the other foot.

Last point in this relatively large "rant":
Where's the alliance of parking providers? Where are the conversations, meetings, strategy sessions of Parked.com, Sedo.com, Fabulous.com, NameDrive.com and whoever else is out there? We can create T.R.A.F.F.I.C auctions and Domainer Roundtables but this industry as a whole fails to unite? I'm either completely missing it, or there's still the mentality of "I'm out on my own" going on.

Think people, Think! At this time, we're letting GOOG do the thinking for us.

M.

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

Mike,

I totally agree!