PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

[ZOX]

Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread!

 

[goodkarmaco]

Mike,

your view I mostly agree with and it makes perfect sense. The trouble is the vast majority of internet users will not hear this and what changes the few of us can do may mean nothing in the big picture.

Netmeg,

very true, this is the window of oppourtunity and we each have to open it.

 

[thetruman]

Very interesting analysis Mike, but it seem a little overambitious to drive research on search eng and ads out of Gog globally. This would be a drop in the ocean ... :td:

 

[vbigdeli]

Donny,you didn't stop 2nd/3rd tier SE traffic...why? we were honest arbier....

I think they stopped arbitrage due to some arbiers sent traffic mostly from Non-English speaking countries to the english pages

 

[Avo19]

Donny,you didn't stop 2nd/3rd tier SE traffic...why? we were honest arbier....

I think they stopped arbitrage due to some arbiers sent traffic mostly from Non-English speaking countries to the english pages

This is probably completely unfounded, but I did hear a whisper that Yahoo, at the time of the crackdown on arbitrage @ Parked, had dropped the overall TQ score of Parked to 5. As I said, that could be complete bunkum...

 

[Donny]

netmeg - Email sent to our stats guy.

Mike - Drink another bottle it's amazing what people write when they have two bottles in them. If that doesn't work, tomorrow night drink a bottle of MD 20/20 or some Boones.

vbigdeli - If you are saying that some people are still doing arbitrage with us by using some 2nd/3rd tier, PM me. We are monitoring that on an hourly basis still.

Avo19 - Yep, you are right. We are a 7 now. And should probably be an 8 next week.

Donny

 

[winst]

Wow, I totally did not realize how much money people are losing! I did not know how much money people were making with arbitrage.

My domain names are profitable without arbitrage, but they are only making back my registration costs.

On the other hand, because I use Google to find solutions all day for my day job, I often get frustrated with ads link to several levels of parked pages that further and further away from what I was looking for.

I think the long term solution is "user behavior modeling" for buying ads. Google's search algorithm seem to "know" what I was searching for, but there is no way for me to tap into that data and make sure that my ads can target beyond just keywords and sites.

Another solution might be for parked pages to do the same "user behavior modeling" and "guess" what the user is really searching for. Keywords are so limiting.

 

[John Doe]

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

I feel bad because Parked is loosing much. But I don`t think Google and Yahoo earnings will suffer remarkably without arbitrage. In the end of the day there is only endusers money on the table. And that money is taken just other way. Googles formulas are changed, they supply to endusers much more clicks from searches since beginning of this year. For example one of my customers is spending monthly 3 times more than year ago because of that.

Parking and domaining doesn`t even exist in a big picture. Loosing millions? Millions are pennys. Google shareholders have lost 80 billions since January because of drop in stock price. Google earnings are expected to be almost 5 billions this quarter. Shareholders are waiting earnings to grow at least 30-40% yoy. Advertisers budgets are under pressure, that way part of additional earnings must be withdrawn from middlemans pockets.

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. When elephants make love, also it`s the grass that suffers. Sad, but welcome to reality. Third consecutive day without single click for me at Parked

 

[Seabass]

What I have not understood is that I would have expected when the Ask feed was pulled PPC would have gone up on day one, meaning that most of Ask's monetization came from domains that were adult, racy, or foreign, in which most pay out less on. But instead, almost as if Yahoo had planned it, PPC prices dropped a couple three cents as a "averaged PPC" upon adjustment starting March 2nd.

Now, the CTR having gone down - I understand that somewhat, b/c the adult and racy domains can have high click rates, and when the relevant content from Ask was removed the "averaged CTR" trended downward. But it still is strange it went down as much as it did.

Now, with what Donny was saying above, that maybe Yahoo is trying to bring numbers in lower to thwart a MS takeover by nixing arbitrage, well maybe this is the reason for the 2-3 cent downward PPC pressure on regular payouts as well ???

Did anyone else notice this, or was it just me?
.

 

[PowerUp]

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. When elephants make love, also it`s the grass that suffers. Sad, but welcome to reality.

LOL. I like this analogy. Rep ++

 

[DnPresident]

Here's part of an email I received on Feb 25, 2008 from another Parking company with a Yahoo feed:
~Due to recent changes implemented by our upstream provider, as well as revisions to our own regulations and policies, we will not be able to support arbitrage traffic on parked domains. As such, we kindly ask that you make alternate arrangements for your domains with arbitrage traffic moving forward. By all means, you may continue parking any domains that generate purely natural (type-in) traffic, as we would be glad to monetize that portion of your portfolio~

My understanding is that at this time most Parking companies with yahoo and google feeds are not allowing PPC driven traffic from Yahoo, adwords, Ask or lower tier sources.

My question is, If PPC traffic from these top tier Search engines such as Google and Yahoo aren't good enough for their own advertisers. Why? and why even offer PPC advertising if it doesn't convert?

I get the feeling Google and yahoo are saying PPC Ads are good enough for your website or service but not good enough for their own advertisers because the conversions may be too low. If this is the message and the general over all mass of PPC advertisers found out, it could really be the bomb shell that drops Google and Yahoos PPC advertising to much lower levels. Keeping the stocks on the low road.

 

[rickkumar]

Q1: Does parked allow us to insert affiliate links on our parking pages? If yes, then where do we insert it? In the custom content section at the bottom of the page?

Q2: Has anyone had any success doing it so far?

Please advise.

Thanks.

 

[goodkarmaco]

Donney,

thanks for keeping us informed. It all makes sense. I hope you can get your revenues back up somehow. One thing, with experience comes knowledge. Those that have knowledge can overcome most hardships as they have the tools to reinvent.

 

[rickkumar]

Suggestions for Parked:

I think many companies have missed to boat on geo-targeted domains. Lots of domainers have lots of geo-targeted domains such as state+service.com, city+service.com, country+service.com ....PhiladelphiaLifeInsurance, FullertonBank, DetroitTV, CaliforniaDisabilityInsurance, etc
We also have lots of such domains.....Parked has great system but its doesn't handle geo-domains well, only about 1% of geo-domains get properly optimized at parked or lets say at other services as well. HF has little better %.

I noticed that anytime parked or any other service properly recognizes and optimize the geo-domain lander with all relevant local citi/state content.....the CTR went thru the roof and the domain made very good money. But it is very rare that a geo-domain gets properly optimized. I had one domain at parked that was so well optimized with all local relevant ads that it amazed me how nicely it performed .. average 70% CTR, but again 99% other never optimized properly even if I tried.

I think thats one area where parked can make a big difference....coming up with nice geo-targeted landers for various categories.

Thanks.

 

[Seabass]

Professional, fixed payout, lead generation, plug-n-play templates for lead-type domains is an option I would like to see as an additional option to regular parking.

This could work on a "geo" scale too if done right.
.

 

[Donny]

rickkumar - I don't think any of us have really missed the boat on geo-targeted domains, I think we just do the best that we can do. Let's take PhiladelphiaLifeInsurance for example. I won't comment on what your current provider is showing. But with Parked our system works on categories, a single category. So is "Philadelphia Life Insurance" under than "Philadelphia" category or the "Life Insurance" category? In our case we didn't have the full keyword at all, so we used "Life Insurance". If we put the full keyword under Philadephia, you wouldn't get many life insurance terms, but you would get more Philadelphia terms. We also optimize domains based on traffic, so if say this domain would have received more traffic we would have optimized the keyword one way or the other. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but one we add the keyword just once, our system will know it forever.

Also you can put the affiliate link at the bottom of your content page. I have one at the bottom of http://www.phpscripts.com/, it works fine. I have a few signups in the past few weeks.

DNPresident - Great comments, if it's good enough for our customers, why isn't it good enough for ourselves.

Donny

 

[rickkumar]

rickkumar - I don't think any of us have really missed the boat on geo-targeted domains, I think we just do the best that we can do. Let's take PhiladelphiaLifeInsurance for example. I won't comment on what your current provider is showing. But with Parked our system works on categories, a single category. So is "Philadelphia Life Insurance" under than "Philadelphia" category or the "Life Insurance" category? In our case we didn't have the full keyword at all, so we used "Life Insurance". If we put the full keyword under Philadephia, you wouldn't get many life insurance terms, but you would get more Philadelphia terms. We also optimize domains based on traffic, so if say this domain would have received more traffic we would have optimized the keyword one way or the other. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but one we add the keyword just once, our system will know it forever.

Also you can put the affiliate link at the bottom of your content page. I have one at the bottom of http://www.phpscripts.com/, it works fine. I have a few signups in the past few weeks.

Donny

Donny,

I understand how your system works, but I was just making a suggestion that if it can somehow be perfected to work with geo-targeted domains ... it is more like a wish Btw, one of my domains FullertonBank was so nicely optimized that it was just unbelievable....almost all local bank ads in Fullerton. Now how that happened, I have no idea but your system did it automatically....CTR was amazing.

Btw, I like that phpscripts.com affilaite link and content section.

Now I may assume that the affiliate link must match the domain category/meaning, such as adult affiliate link only on adult domains, insurance link on on insurance domains etc. Right?

 

[netmeg]

I have a lot of those geo-targeted domains as well - while the automated system usually does a fairly good job, I usually optimize everything myself anyway when I have time; but one thing I have noticed that the keyword almost always tends to get confused on a state or city with more than one word - such as north carolina or san jose. FWIW.

 

[xrvel]

Hi,

Can i add an article from Wikipedia to my custom content (with Wikipedia link) ?

Thanks
- Kurniawan

 

[Jasdon]

Although I've had an account for quite a while (opened an account when you started but moved the names out shortly after) I just started to try a few names again after reading so many positives.

I have to say, I'm impressed with the RPC which so far seems to be far greater than ND, and compares to my Adsense. Hope it stays that way as I'm going to move more names over.

 

[netmeg]

Hi,

Can i add an article from Wikipedia to my custom content (with Wikipedia link) ?

Thanks
- Kurniawan

You can, but it will probably do you harm in Google. Although, parked domains aren't doing well in Google right now in general, but this would pretty much nail it, being duplicate content. You've got a slightly better chance if you can add something unique.

 

[kemjika11]

I agree with netmeg on keeping revenue-generating names where they are. Ever since arbirtrage was stopped, i think i'm relatively happy with the RPC, and my income has fluctuated a bit, but i think its stable enough for me. If anything, Get better names! thats all i can say really.

 

[Name Trader]

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.

I just saw an interview on tv with Google's CEO, Schmidt where he was suggesting, with tongue firmly planted in his cheek, that Microsoft's proposed takeover of Yahoo! might be anti-competitive, because Microsoft had been found guilty of anti-competitive behavior in the past

 

[thaitraveler]

I know what arbitrage is in the financial world, but can someone please explain the terminology in the domainers world. Thanks.

 

[Mike]

I just saw an interview on tv with Google's CEO, Schmidt where he was suggesting, with tongue firmly planted in his cheek, that Microsoft's proposed takeover of Yahoo! might be anti-competitive, because Microsoft had been found guilty of anti-competitive behavior in the past

You didn't really expect Schmidt to be pro MSFT?!
I'm done commenting on it though (public sigh of relieve), i'll stick with my anti Google attitude to my own site

M.

I know what arbitrage is in the financial world, but can someone please explain the terminology in the domainers world. Thanks.

Buy low - convert for higher.
- Buy listings and get clicks on Google for a price of 20 cents per click
- User gets to your site >>clicks on a link
- You're getting 60 cents from the parking company.

Cost/Investment: 20 cents - Revenue: 60 cents > Profit: 40 cents
300% ROI or 200% profit if you will - "ca-ching". (Numbers are fictitious of course

That's the most simplified version i can present. Anything beyond that gets into the "how-to" and that would almost be wasted time since arbitrage is outlawed.
Hope that helped somewhat though.

M.

 

[xrvel]

You can, but it will probably do you harm in Google. Although, parked domains aren't doing well in Google right now in general, but this would pretty much nail it, being duplicate content. You've got a slightly better chance if you can add something unique.

Thank you, Netmeg for your opinion.

I think i will add something unique as my content

Regards,
Kurniawan.