- Impact
- 11,347
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.
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.
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I don't know how you acquire domains. Hand-regging available domains isn't going to be a good source of parking revenue, generally. You need to buy domains with quality links on keywords which pay more than 11 cents 
