Above.com Review

[Name Trader]

Where was I? I had all my .com domains at Parked and everything else at Bodis. Back in February I was waxing lyrical about Parked being back on top of their game. I had 2 months where I received almost record payouts (of all time... maybe in 3-4 years of parking). Then everything fell off a cliff and I was getting approx 2/3rds less. On 7th July I received only about $6.50 in revenue, which was abysmal. The day before that I had decided to try Above.com.

What is Above.com? In short, it's a traffic forwarder to your Parking Accounts. It decides where to send the traffic for each domain based upon which parking service gives the best returns. This sounds great. No longer do you need to park a group of domains with company A for a couple of months, enter the results into a spreadsheet, then park them at company B for a couple of months, enter the results in a spreadsheet. And so on. Now all this is done in Real Time, by Above.com.

Who are Above.com? They are part of the Trellian network of companies, who I first came across using their KeywordDisovery.com tool. So, I had confidence in them from the getgo.

It was easy to setup an account. You then go to Manage Accounts and setup the Parking Companies you wish to use from the list of companies they support. I chose Bodis, Parked, TrafficZ, DomainSponsor. The latter two I probably haven't used in a couple of years. You need to provide your username and password for each account. Of course there is a slight risk in this, but given the size of Trellian, I didn't have a real problem with this.

You can then go to Manage Folders and setup Folders for groups of domains. I however, imported everything into the default folder. Subsequently, I created two other folders, 1) Revenue, and 2) No Revenue. I moved everything from the default folder to No Revenue, and then moved them to Revenue, once Above.com reported revenue. You do this by downloading the .CSV file for the Non-Revenue domains, sort the SpreadSheet by Revenue, and then copy/past these into the Add Domains to the Revenue Folder. There is no copy/move command in Above.com. You either Add or Remove Domains, and Above.com moves the domains to the new Folder.

You of course have to add all your domains to each Parking Service individually (even if this can be done in bulk).

What is Maximizer? This is Above.com's inhouse Parking Service. They say that by some complex algorythms they monetize visitors which are poorly monetized by regular parking companies. For example, Asian traffic. When I look at the stats compared to the other parking companies (which is easy to do by clicking on Statistics and choosing what you want), I see mostly very low rates per click, like $0.02, significantly less than the rates/click for the same domain from the other parking companies. Who is to say that Above.com got it right or not? Maximizer provided about 1/5th of my Total Revenue for August. I've turned it off for Sept to see how the portfolio perform without it.

The Statistics are very comprehensive. You can select one or more parking services and a whole slew of stats like clicks, revenue, EPC etc.

How is support? I think there is only 1 support personnel. I usually get answers to my questions in about 1-3 days. So not the speediest support in the world, but I can't think of any support question which requires an immediate reply. So i'm reasonably satisfied.

How did I do? Well Above.com say it takes about 2 months to get your portfolio optimized. It's now been just two months for me. So maybe my best month will be Sept. But anyhow, in August, my 2nd month, Above.com managed to give me returns just below my record earnings of February. So, about 80-100% better than my earnings in June. This is a significant jump in earnings. It was split (in approx terms) 20% each from Bodis, Maximizer, DomainSponsor, and most of the rest from Parked. Almost nothing from TrafficZ, barely making the minimum payment for both July and August.

The website is sometimes a bit flakey. Not really surprising considering the amount of data they must be churning out. But usually it works itself out within a short time, usually minutes. My biggest gripe is that the Statistics Reports only allow you report 100 domains per page (whereas the Reports allow 1000). Also that there is no portfolio total reported in the Stats. You have to add up each page total.

Am I going to continue with Above.com? You betcha! I've disable the Maximizer to see how my portfolio performs without it and I'll probably disable TrafficZ also. I'd recommend to anyone to try Above.com. It really take away the drudgery of manually testing domains at different parking services.

 

[hemirate]

I think I got a problem in the latest week where some of my domain names are not showing landing pages through above.com

I don't know if it is a problem with one of the parking services.

I tried to visit some of my domain names and what i get on landing is just a message like this "Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (9)"

The domain i visited gets rdirect to ww31.xxxxxxxxx.com

Why does it happens?

Thanks

 

[Name Trader]

What did their support say when you asked them?

 

[shagrace]

parkingcrew.com performs well.

Best Free Credit Card Online Service

 

[wolfis.com]

their website is down half of the time and every day i have issues trying to run reports - just to check out one single domain takes 10 minutes - yes that long it takes to run a report for one single domain - what a joke this service is and with the site down half of the time one wonders how much money and traffic is actually lost .... ?

now it is down again !!

 

[Name Trader]

I've noticed this more and more now too since you first mentioned it before. I think they need a bigger server.

 

[Trellian]

Hi All,

If there are things that we are not addressing quickly, you should all know how to reach me by now. It is not as if I am hard to find. Most have met me at the conferences and have my email. Many clients are on my skype... so if there are delays in report generation and you are not getting replies from your account manager, by all means reach out to me.

As for server issues, most are due to severe ddos attacks. Not sure if you know what these are, but they seem to be rather rampant at present and many parking services that have parked domains are being targeted. Everytime we get hit, we struggle to keep things going. We also need to switch over to ddos mitigation which is never perfect. The last hit we took, even took down the ddos mitigation service which is designed to handle these things... Just about every single day there is a new ddos attack hitting our servers, luckily most are small and we can cope. But some are just too great.

Reporting or login in on the other hand should not be affected. So if these are still occurring, heck email me and everyone else in the company and let us know.

If you do not have contact details and numbers for your account manager, let me know and I will get them to you.

Cheers
David

---------- Post added at 10:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:56 PM ----------

Some also usefull guides to how our service works:

if the domain fails to load at
www.%DOAMIN.com%
or
%DOAMIN.com%

then it is on our end. This means we failed to load the page.


If the domain is redirected to
ww##.%DOMAIN.com%

such as in this case:

The domain i visited gets rdirect to ww31.xxxxxxxxx.com
Thanks

This means that the rotation on our end worked. If a domain loads ww## it means it has gone past our rotation platform and has hit the parking company. If the page is not loaded there, then this means that the parking company failed to load the page.


And finally if the domain redirects to a totally different Domain, this is due to 2 potential reasons, (assuming you dont have it set to do that manually). One is the traffic is redirected by the parking companies to various direct advertisers, affiliate programs etc that they use to monetize domain traffic, and 2, it was our Maximizer sending the traffic to one of our direct advertisers.

You can tell the 2 apart as the ones going through the parking company will 1st need to go through the ww## loop 1st.

I hope that helps explain what all these loops mean.

Cheers
David

 

[wolfis.com]

and for those who DO NOT KNOW how to reach you ???

again how do i get answers - i have every single day between 10 am and 2 pm est time problems loading YOUR website and running reports or even having the daily updates .

your support email does not get answerred and domain comflicts dtake days - for example yeasterday i got a domain and some scammer added it to above and before i could ( as it happened 100's of times before when you buy a domain at auction ! - domain is now almost 24 hours showing as conflict and i claimed it a dozened times and the whois clearly shows my name )

one single question : HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO TAKE CARE OF ANYTHING LIKE THIS ?

and something about your statement is not right - i am running reports every single day and every single day there are hours where a report on one single domain takes 5 minutes or more and that is fact - your system may show only seconds from start to finish , however to actually start each report takes several minutes - this is fact and i can actually proof it with screenshots i made where for many minutes no time is shows on the job query .
this clearly means that your servers are running way behind and can not keep up with the workload - this is just plain fact !

 

[Trellian]

and for those who DO NOT KNOW how to reach you ???
!

david at trellian.com and we have emailed in the past, once earlier this year according to me sent folder, so you ARE one that already knows. And besides there is this big search engines out there that those that dont, can search for me.

your support email does not get answerred and domain comflicts dtake days - for example yeasterday i got a domain and some scammer added it to above and before i could ( as it happened 100's of times before when you buy a domain at auction ! - domain is now almost 24 hours showing as conflict and i claimed it a dozened times and the whois clearly shows my name )
!

I checked our support ticket queue and there are no open tickets there from you. The last email from you was 32 days ago. Can you plz forward any emails you have sent to me directly and I will make sure that they are addressed promptly.

As for domain conflicts, unlike domainers we run normal office hours. So during weekends the conflicts will not be resolved. No point claiming the domain over and over again, just once is sufficient. Every day there are thousands of conflicts that our staff need to manually check the whois of each one. So you might think that waiting a day or a few for this to be resolved is unreasonable, I however do not. There are just limits to what we can offer especially on weekends for a service that is free to use. Also as you know you can speed up the process by sending a screen shot of your domain in your registrar to our support and they can fast track the domain conflicts. Besides it is not as if you are losing out on parking revenues while there is a conflict in place at Above. As you well know that you only change DNS to ours once there are no conflicts on a domain. So this is not something that is affecting you or any other client financially.

i am running reports every single day and every single day there are hours where a report on one single domain takes 5 minutes or more ....

Can you email the reports and the specifics, domain, filters, date ranges etc.. you are running and we can have our techs do some logging to see what is happening. There are a few times in the day when the database is updated and there are load issues when this is in progress, so those we are fully aware of and have plans for additional servers to be installed later in the year. So lets hope that this will address these issues you are having. But in eithercase, please still send me the report details so that we can log them and see what is really going on.

Cheers
David

 

[wolfis.com]

first off there is in fact a support ticket open from me : Ticket n°2013072710001492
seconddly : what are you talking about ?
"Besides it is not as if you are losing out on parking revenues while there is a conflict in place at Above. As you well know that you only change DNS to ours once there are no conflicts on a domain. So this is not something that is affecting you or any other client financially."

of course i can change the nameservers evenso there is a conflict - - but i would LOOSE money if your system delivers what your company promisses - making more money - as long there is a conflict , if i would change the nameservers i would loose ALL revenue as the domain is not in my account - so what on earth are you talking about ?

also - you are right that the service is free ( and this is your second time you clearly remind me of it .) - but you also make money of me ! and just in case you forget without clients you do not have a company !

 

[Trellian]

Wolfgang, I am just trying to help here...

as for

first off there is in fact a support ticket open from me : Ticket n°2013072710001492

Sorry my mistake, you used a different email, not the one on your user account. This ticket was received early Sunday morning and with our normal Monday to Friday working hours, please bear with us in trying to answer support tickets received on weekends. In eithercase we are already looking into this ticket for you.

of course i can change the nameservers evenso there is a conflict - - but i would LOOSE money if your system delivers what your company promisses - making more money - as long there is a conflict , if i would change the nameservers i would loose ALL revenue as the domain is not in my account - so what on earth are you talking about ?

I think you have things confused. If you point the domain to the parking company directly you still make 100% of the revenues. No loss what so ever.

Maybe you are referring to the ability to make more money, so you might be missing out on making even more, faster. Now this is indeed a valid point and fair enough. But still not losing money, just not making as much as you could.

In either case, if a domain is making say $50 per month.
say it takes 3 days to resolve a conflict, and if on average we can increase revenues by 20%, this will only amount to $1 that is the "potential" gain for those 3 days that you "might" have made extra.

The time taken to resolve conflicts can be sped up as per my prior post. So for any important or high revenue domains please do that for a much faster response to conflicts and keep in mind that conflicts are not resolved on weekends.

Wolfgang, I can see you are passionate about domaining, and expect everything to work flawlessly, and yes we need clients and clients to be happy. But we also need to make sure that clients have realistic expectations. That is not to say that no one should be posting if things are not working, as this also makes us work harder... but just saying, if you want to use the service, work with us and not against us.

The 1 email you sent reporting that the site is not working is a start in the right direction and appreciated. Posting here although up to you, does not get seen by our tech staff, so does not help us resolve issues. If you have issues like that, let us know as they happen, dont wait for things like that, there is no need to get frustrated when reported right away.

Cheers
David

 

[Trellian]

Wolfgang, our techs provided an answer, "Yes websites were slow on Saturday night. This happened several times for a few minutes each time, causing timeouts on occasions. This affected the above.com website, but not the parking traffic. Around 5AM on Sunday I found the cause and stopped it."

I am getting more info as to what cuased is so that we can put a permanant stop to this for you. So we are continuing to work on the reported issue. Thank you again for reporting it.

 

[Trellian]

Wolfgang, I have not heard from you. Do you have any additional info for me on the type of reports you are running? We would really like to look into this more for you but need to know what type of reports you are running, what filters you have selected etc.. if you could email me those details that would be appreciated.

---------- Post added at 11:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:48 AM ----------

Never mind Wolfgang, our techs just reported that they indeed found time delays when a report is requested and when the job actually started, due to other data import jobs already in the queue. They have implemented a change to make these jobs a greater priority so that they jump the queue and are testing this out at preset. This will be monitored for the next few days to a week to make sure this has resolved your reported issue. Once again thank you.

 

[Trellian]

One more follow up post Wolfgang, techs have identified one other cause that was delaying reports of single domains, so that should also be resolved and improved.

Cheers
David

 

[wolfis.com]

thank you for fixing this.

 

[Trellian]

Glad to help!

 

[keung]

I have recently signed up with Above, transferred all of my domains to their nameservers, and I have set up a few accounts at various parking services. I read earlier in the thread that it'll take 2 months to optimize, what exactly does that mean?

My domains doesn't attract a whole lot of visits or clicks per day, but there were at least a few clicks per week when I had them on sedo. Does these clicks get lost during this optimization period?

I also noticed several hundred hits per day the past three days since I signed up, but only 1% of these were unique. At first I thought that it was part of the optimization, but I tried surfing onto several of the domains, and I kept getting redirected from www,domain.com to ww1,domain.com, then back to www, over and over. Is this a temporary error (part of optimization?) or should I contact their tech support?

I must admit that this service looks very interesting. The CPC I had at sedo seemed to be below 0.01 EUR, and in a few months I had only accumulated a little over 1 EUR. Hopefully I'll see some better results with Above

 

[Trellian]

The stats will differ to what is reported at Sedo. Each parking service filter out bot traffic differently. Some report only on traffic that they can monetize. So the traffic that we report is what we see.

Secondly any issues, yes dont wait and report them to our tech support.

Cheers
David

 

[Name Trader]

My first question for you is...

For all the domains you have added to Above.com, you have also added them to whichever parking services you have selected to use at above.com? And you have set the nameservers to ns1.above.com, ns2.above.com at your registrar?

Now to answer your questions

Optimize. Some people expect they will get there best results after only 1 or 2 days parking. To be realistic, it isn't possible for Above.com to optimize your domains over various parking companies over a couple of days. Of course I'm not saying you shouldn't monitor progress on a daily basis. But you should wait a couple of months before comparing your results with what you had before.

Lost Clicks. You won't lose any clicks or revenue through the optimization process provided you have answered my two questions with a YES.

Hits. Those hits could always be bots/crawlers. And most probably are if the uniques are considerably less. Uniques are a much more sensible indicator to follow. The switching between www and ww1 is probably part of the optimization process.

What companies are you using as parking providers? You should definitely use Voodoo as one of them.

 

[thuramsen]

hello

i have register above.com with little domain also with my parking company user name ..

but my question is my parking revenue paid via above.com or via parking company

 

[Trellian]

parking revenue is paid via the parking company directly to you.

 

[thuramsen]

thanks but above.com right side balance is 0.0000 what is that balance

 

[keung]

Thanks Trellian, I just noticed that some domains had 0 uniques and several hits, which is why I thought it could have something to do with the optimization process.

stub:
Yes, I added all my domains to all the parking services I currently have (which is sedo, Voodoo and ParkingCrew).

I do understand that I won't see much difference after only a few days, I was just a little worried some clicks could be lost. After all, that's why we're using parking services, is it not?

I will most likely be watching my dashboard on a day to day basis, just to see how everything is turning out. Once I see everything is working smoothly, I will go into each company and optimize the domains with keywords and such.

How can I check which parking service the domains are currently on?

 

[Name Trader]

In your dashboard/reports, the first logo on the left of each domain is the current parking provider. The second is the backup parking provider.

I think you will spend a lot of time playing with keywords, etc. But since keywords are decided by Google 99.9999% of the time, it will be a hard slog with very little reward. Concentrate your efforts for those domains with traffic but no clicks. But it may all be fruitless. So try one or two domains per parking provider, to see if you get any results.

 

[Trellian]

thanks but above.com right side balance is 0.0000 what is that balance

At Above there are 2 balances:

Main Account Balance, that you can see in the Registrar and Marketplace tabs, that is used to pay for Above.com services, such as Domain Registrations, and Marketplace orders.

Maximizer Balance that you can see in the Parking Manager tab (which is earnings that Above pays out to Domain Owners for any traffic that we are able to sell to direct advertisers for a premium above and beyond what the parking companies are paying you)

Clients are not automatically approved for our Maximizer program as we also require parking stats to create a benchmark, so it can be a few months before maximizer actually is activated and then kicks in.

Cheers
David

 

[keung]

In your dashboard/reports, the first logo on the left of each domain is the current parking provider. The second is the backup parking provider.

I think you will spend a lot of time playing with keywords, etc. But since keywords are decided by Google 99.9999% of the time, it will be a hard slog with very little reward. Concentrate your efforts for those domains with traffic but no clicks. But it may all be fruitless. So try one or two domains per parking provider, to see if you get any results.

Thanks for the tip. Despite having had domains parked for a long time, I haven't actually put much work or thought into it. Selling domains have this far been my main goal.