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.

 

[Teddy7]

Both optimize parking earnings for domains over multiple parking services. The intelligent algorithm driving both platforms is similar.

ParkLogic vs. Above

PL - you outsource the management of your domains to PL. PL optimizes your earnings and takes a fee from your earnings for their service. You are paid your parking earnings by PL. You are use PL's parking feeds as you do not have a direct relationship with the parking service providers.

Above - you enter your existing parking account information into the Above platform along with you domains. Above optimizes your traffic. You keep 100% of your earnings from parking companies and parking companies pay you directly. Service at Above is free. You have additional revenue earning opportunity at Above with Maximizer. When Maximizer is enabled, Above will let direct advertisers (zero click) compete with the parking companies for your traffic. Earnings from Maximizer are paid by Above.

Thank you! Very helpfull!

 

[Victor Pitts]

When entering our parking account information, is it secure? I assume that our account ID and password is being entered and wanted to make sure that its encrypted.

Yes it is secure. Password is encrypted so even Above support cannot see it. The UN and PW are required to pull stats, but Above is never authorized to log into your account even if the password was made available.

Regards,
Victor

 

[Hypersot]

-add all your domains to each of the parking services you need to use (make sure that above.com supports them)
-add all your domains to above.com
-change nameservers for all your domains to above.com's nameservers (ie. ns1.above.com , ns2.above.com)
-make sure you have created accounts for all the parking services you're going to use within above.com's 'add account' section (better not to forget this)

you're good to go

 

[Name Trader]

@sirlordcomic - You need to add all your parked domains to both Bodis.com and Above.com before you change the domains nameservers to above.com. While you are at this, I'd highly recommend that you also open accounts at Voodoo.com and ParkingCrew.com as well. Because you will get more benefit from the competition created. Also, although there is maybe some data benefit from using Above.com as the data source for all you 1 parking company strategy, the real power of Above.com is being lost, if you only use the 1 parking company.

Yes and @Hypersot is correct. You need to add Bodis.com and whoever else as an account with Above.com (which might be the solution to your current problem).

 

[Name Trader]

Old thread, but great information. I am super negligent about properly optimizing all of my domains. It's always on my list, but with over 1K domains, the thought of this project is daunting. But one thing this thread made me think about; what parking companies are people using nowadays? It seems like some of those referenced in this thread are no longer around. I use ParkingCrew, Bodis, Sedo and Voodoo. Is there any others that I should be looking at?

I usually don't use any parking company which pays me less than $100/month for all my domains. Bodis qualified for this exclusion about 6 months ago. I'm not saying they are not a good parking company. I think they are. But cannot compete with 1) Parking Crew, and 2) Voodoo. The only 2 parking companies I now use. Sedo has never competed well against these other three. And I don't like their policy of only paying for the first click with nothing for subsequent clicks. Unlike most parking companies, which pay for every click.

 

[sirlordcomic]

yeah, I had something strange going on between PC and Above. Asked PC about it.

300 uniques and 32 clicks on one site $.02 revenue


2016-01-19 Tue.* 6 3 50.00% * $ 0.00 * $ 0.00 * $ 0.00
2016-01-18 Mon.* 35 13 37.14% * $ 0.00 * $ 0.00 * $ 0.00
2016-01-17 Sun. 47 34 72.34% $ 0.00 $ 0.43 $ 0.02

 

[Haris]

Not sure why my clicks at ParkingCrew are worth zero....as shown by Above stats.

same here

 

[Hypersot]

I agree with this.



Let´s suppose my domain name gets 500 visits a day and i get $5 a day when it is parked at parkingcrew.com.
If i split visits between 5 services, shoudn´t i get the same 500 "reported visits"?
At parkingcrew i got 500 visits and $5 a day, later at above i got only 75% of those visits and income, 375 visits and $3.75 a day.
So i changed it back to parkingcrew and i got 500 visits and $5 a day again. ?????

What i think is that any technical issue is affecting the visits.
Maybe, when a visitor enters the domain name, there is any software avoiding him to end viewing the parking site.

Nevertheless, when parkingcrew´s dns are set it does not happen.

I don't think you understand how the whole thing works to be honest (no offence intended)

using your example above with 500 visits:

Let's suppose that Parking A is PC. And your *original* traffic (ie. unfiltered) is 800

-When dns = PC , Visits shown = 500, Visits filtered = 300, Earnings = $5


-When dns = Above.com, the following things might happen:

out of the 800 *unfiltered* traffic, each parking service will receive some of that traffic.
Following to the above, each parking service will *filter* some traffic (or maybe not). So, in the case that every parking service received equal traffic of 25%, you might have:
PC: 250 received, 175 shown as reported, Earnings = $2
ParkingB: 250 received, 100 shown as reported, Earnings = $0 (not optimized yet)
ParkingC: 250 received, 250 shown as reported, Earnigs = $1 (not optimized fully yet)
ParkingD: 250 received, 50 shown as reported, Earnings = $1.5 (fully optimized)

each parking service filters traffic in different ways so the resulting 'reported' traffic can be less than what you see in your parkingcrew dashboard

as for the earnings, it all depends how far the optimization on both the above.com AND on each parking service has been reached.
With 'normal' traffic you'll need around 15 days per parking service involved to see a roughly how each parking service performs.

The above is only a rough indication how the whole system works just to give you an idea.
All in all though, what you currently see in your above.com interface should be normal.

 

[Name Trader]

Maximizer - is just their ZeroClick-network (Trellian).
And that's all.

I haven't said anything which would contradict your comment. I know that. But they won't pass your click to their zero-click network unless they know it will pay more for your clicks. I personally, don't like the fact that they have their own zero-click network competing for our clicks. I'm uncomfortable about that. So I generally have Maximizer turned off.

 

[alcy]

above.com is so much more than just a maximizer or about parking domains for money. its the best way to redirect and control traffic from all your registrars.. to anywhere in the universe. with a 1 second long click of your mouse. whethers its your own sale lander or whatever else.

just be sure to turn off their maximizer, or u get slapped with zero click ads as they see fit.. and you can forget abotu anyone ever knowing your domain is for sale.

 

[Name Trader]

@stub Why don't you just remove the middle man and just setup a site to sell your domains?
I talked to some people here who mentioned that it's hard to even make the renewal cost when parking?
If you don't mind me asking, How many domains do you have parking?
I got around 250 and debating parking or a clean sale site.

I'm with voodoo, Bodis and above

I do have my own selling site, although it's under further development, at the moment. You should add Parking Crew to your list of parking companies. They pay much better than Bodis and Voodoo. Not on every domain. But overall.

 

[Name Trader]

I think it was marginal improvement with it turned on. But I'm not really impressed with marginal improvements. And because there is always the possibility, because they are competing with your parking companies, for foul play. I turned it off because the marginal improvement wasn't worth the risk. Now, I'm not saying Above are playing fast and loose with your clicks. In fact I believe what they say, in that it has to be a 20% improvement for them to switch. But I'm just personally uncomfortable with the possibilities.

 

[pablohc86]

It's a shame DomainNameSales/Uniregistry don't integrate properly with Above. I mean you can pull stats in but they're not able to send any traffic there.

Does anyone know why? - I asked DNS a while ago but the response was short and vague. Surely they'd get more traffic and (as a result) sales inquiries if they opened up this route?

no idea too why they are not supported.

Hi pablohc86
thanks for your reply
but do you mean parklogic is better than voodoo, parking crew and sedo? and yes my earnings are bigger than 1000$ a month

i'm still not sure if PL is better than other companies. For sure PL do a great job to optimize for you the domains and you don't have to worry about that, and usually this is useful for big traffic portfolio owners.

Btw PL (Park Logic) doesn't accept everyone to join their system, they need to approve your portfolio before to start. with PC or Voodoo and others, it's easier to get an account .

 

[Name Trader]

OK. It's been a while since I visited this thread. Nothing much has changed except parking revenues continue to slide.

I think I've said it before. But in case I haven't. Once a parking provider fails consistently (2 months or more) to pay me more than $100/month, they get booted from my group of parking providers. Usually, this is not just a sudden drop. But the revenues see continual drops over a longer period of (say) 6 months, before they fall within this threshold. Which has culminated in me now using only 2 providers Voodoo and Parking Crew. Voodoo continues to drop faster than ParkingCrew. My parking revenue is approx 50% of what it was a year ago. As I've said before. I don't depend on parking revenue, but it does continue to provide useful cash flow for renewals.

 

[snicksnack]

nice review. I use above.com as well and also happy with the system. Going to give keyrpm.com a try. They do basically the same as above.com, but they also optimize the keywords. Once I tried, I will post my findings.

 

[nicedomains]

Good review Stu! Above.com is a great service for domainers.

 

[Name Trader]

KeyRPM.com charges $150/month after the 1 month free trial. And that is for a limited account. You'd need to make a SIGNIFICANT increase in revenue to cover those charges. If you only increase your revenue by the amount of the charges, you might just as well remain with the status quo. Will be interested to see your findings.

 

[Trellian]

Thanks Stu for the review.

It is always great to get feedback from users.

Will make sure to improve on the points you have raised.

Cheers
David

 

[Name Trader]

Wow! I didn't expect to raise the interest of Trellian themselves. I'd be very grateful if you could increase the number of domain per page on the Statistics to 1000, and provide a portfolio total somewhere, maybe at the top of each Statistics report.

 

[pwr1019]

I have a question for Trellian about Above.com - I started to configure an Above.com account but received an e-mail from SedoPro that Sedo is set to no longer accept domain forwarding only DNS pointing? Sedo mailing stated

"At the end of September, our ad provider will cease its provision of advertising to URL-parked pages and any parked domains that have not switched to DNS (domain name server) parking will not be served with advertising"

Since they are on a google feed is this likely only a matter of time before this is the case at all google feed based parking providers?

Further they also stated that;

"DNS parked domains often have a higher CTR, due to the better load time, which results in more parking revenue for you"

How will this effect Above.com?

 

[Name Trader]

It won't. Above uses DNS Parking.

I must say that the first three days of Sept have been a disaster. About half of Aug. That cannot all be explained away by stopping Maximizer and TrafficZ. But then again, performance isn't Above's fault, unless they're sending the domains to the wrong provider.

 

[pwr1019]

It won't. Above uses DNS Parking.

I must be missing something - from above.com when setting up Sedo

Redirect URL

You can specify a custom redirect URL to use when sending traffic to SEDO. If left blank, the default redirect method will be used.

Note: Use the $D variable where ever a domain name needs to be inserted.

Example: http://www.sedoparking.com/$D


How does it use dns parking? It appears that it functions by pointing the domains to above.com (via their dns ns1.above.com) and then they URL forward your domains to various parking providers. Sedo is discontinuing any URL forwarding. Stub you are saying that is not the case??

 

[Name Trader]

All that stuff is if you don't use the default nameservers ns1.sedoparking.com & ns2.sedoparking.com. You only need to enter a) your sedo username, 2) your password, 3) tick Enabled, 4) tick Add Account. Above.com will use the above nameservers.

 

[yon]

I have a lot of domains. Can I use my dns server?

 

[HC82]

I don't use Above.com the way you use them, I just use them as a way to view all of my stats from the various parking companies in one place.

And you are right to be using DomainSponsor again. I've been using them a few months now and they are blowing away Parked.com