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.

 

[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.

 

[zalta1981]

It would be nice to receive an official statement as well.

I wanted to know if they probably get a % of impression on our domains on one of their account or if they shoot pop-unders on parked domain names.

Or Let's say I have bodis and voodoo but they will park it on their parking services like once every 10 visitors.

 

[wolfis.com]

anybody any idea when they pay - it is usually between the 25th and 29th - but i am confused as my account shows pending payment since the 25th and nothing happened ?

update - payments just arrived .

 

[Optimal Names]

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.

I think they purposely make parking suck nowadays. I dont think they want people to park their domains. For me its probably best to concentrate on selling the domains.

 

[Name Trader]

Since Above.com is only passing the visitors to a particular parking provider, it is not easy to prove, one way or the other, whether they are doing a good job or not with this. This can only be proved if for example, you put all your domains with 1 provider for one month, another provider for a second month and a third provider for a third month. I don't recommend more than three parking providers. Then for a fourth month let Above.com to decide where to send the traffic.

For me personally, I have sworn by above.com doing a good job because my revenue has been increasing using them. But over this last twelve months up to December, I have proved to my own satisfaction that I'm unsure that Above.com is still operating under the best interests of it's main focus group, us domainers.

My revenue has gone down consistently over the last 12 months, Whlist I notice that the Maximizer share of my total revenue has increased to about 10-15% of my total revenue. This is way to much revenue for a service which is supposed to only support revenue for the flakiest of domains. It's more than I receive from Bodis, for example.This is not acceptable to me.

I complained to Voodoo about their revenue drop. They told me it was the traffic drop from Above.com. So I pointed all my domains to Voodoo for about 10 days in December. The revenue wasn't substantially increased (for the best month of the year). So I redirected my domains back to above.com (using only Voodoo, PC, DS, Maximizer), but the revenue remains about the same as only using Voodoo only).

As soon as I get $100 in my Maximizer account, I'm going to drop that service too. I think Above.com is not at this time providing a great service for us domainers who park their domains. This may be because of management changes. But I'm not happy that with their performance over the last year. Although I haven't lost all faith in their technology, yet.

 

[Optimal Names]

Well December is over. There's just a bit of firming up the numbers to do. But anyhow I had my best month ever from parking in about the 4 years I've been parking domains. BEST MONTH EVER!. Yippee!

So, August, then November and now December, all best months ever since I started using Above.com in July 2010. This is definitely a good trend

OK. nothing is exactly comparable because I buy, sell, drop domains all the time. But it's still my BEST MONTH EVER!. Very good considering the depressed parking arena. But still not enough to pay for all the Renewal Fees

I now have a new clear leader in the revenue %. Bodis has been growing steadily as a proportion of total revenue monthly. They took 3 out the top 4 highest revenue domains, and 4 of the top ten.

My Revenues were split Bodis-35%, Parked-25%, DomainSponsor-20%, Maximizer-20%

I highly recommend using Above.com to push your domains to your best paying Parking companies

Looking to AT THE VERY LEAST get these domains to pay for themselves, yearly. Thats all I am hoping for. Everything else will be icing on the cake. I primarily sell my domains for income.

I've got accounts at Bodis, Voodoo and Sedo - does moving everything to Above.com give me an advantage of seeing in advance where I move which domains? I've got a very large portfolio. Tired of making less than $20 per month.

 

[Name Trader]

Yes. You should move to Above.com in order to optimize your domains. Of your three providers I would remove Sedo and Bodis, add PC and DS. Of course, YMMV. But for me personally, Sedo/Bodis have not performed well compared to Voodoo, PC, DS. PC has particularly picked up over recent months. As I said in my previous post, I think Maximizer is taking revenue away from my other providers, so I wouldn't add Maximizer to my domain options.

 

[stoork]

Yes. You should move to Above.com in order to optimize your domains. Of your three providers I would remove Sedo and Bodis, add PC and DS. Of course, YMMV. But for me personally, Sedo/Bodis have not performed well compared to Voodoo, PC, DS. PC has particularly picked up over recent months. As I said in my previous post, I think Maximizer is taking revenue away from my other providers, so I wouldn't add Maximizer to my domain options.

I think I unsubscribe from your account Bodis, its revenues are tragically the last 14 days
maximalizer earn with me 32% of its o.k

maybe I'll try Rookmedia place Bodis - Do you have experience?

 

[Hypersot]

Hmm, what does the maximizer do exactly? I just thought of it as another way to optimize domains so I let it on

Should I turn it off? I also notice that the maximizer is $0.00 under balance , does that mean I have used it wrong or something?

 

[stoork]

Hmm, what does the maximizer do exactly? I just thought of it as another way to optimize domains so I let it on

Should I turn it off? I also notice that the maximizer is $0.00 under balance , does that mean I have used it wrong or something?

turn on
above takes a piece of traffic for themselves and monetize it

 

[Hypersot]

turn on
above takes a piece of traffic for themselves and monetize it

Ah, now I understand why I always had that 'smartname' service included in my list of parking services

That's probably where maximizer traffic goes

Thanks stoork for the clarification

 

[Name Trader]

Yes. You need to turn on Maximizer for all of your parking companies. What it is supposed to do is is try to maximize your revenue for domains which don't work well at other places, ie your worst performing domains. What I think it might be doing is not sending traffic to a parking company but sending it to Maximizer instead. This could be the reason for increasing maximizer revenues but falling parking provider revenues. I'm not necessarily saying they are doing that, but it would be one explanation. I won't really know until I turn it off.

 

[Trellian]

Yes. You should move to Above.com in order to optimize your domains. Of your three providers I would remove Sedo and Bodis, add PC and DS. Of course, YMMV. But for me personally, Sedo/Bodis have not performed well compared to Voodoo, PC, DS. PC has particularly picked up over recent months. As I said in my previous post, I think Maximizer is taking revenue away from my other providers, so I wouldn't add Maximizer to my domain options.

Stub, maximizer only takes traffic and revenues away from parking when we can guarantee to pay at least 20% more than what the parking companies are paying you currently. The algo in place only offers traffic to our direct advertiser network at a rate that is greater than your current parking company baseline. So there is absolutely no reason to not use maximizer in the mix and actually recommending the opposite is detrimental to domainers revenues.

But we too have noticed that in 2013 that most parking revenues are on the decline, this could be more and more to the upstream changes that forced to be put in place in 2013. We have run tests with exclusive tests and then through Above and in all cases Above performs better overall.

As for deaths, that is a bit of a low blow and sort of disappointed by that comment. Losing my brother and the CEO of the company was indeed hard for me personally, but the business is still going strong, we have the best techs to keep rolling out technology enhancements and the management has not changed, instead we have grown stronger as a result.

Cheers
David

---------- Post added at 11:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:12 AM ----------

A further note. Maximizer is for all domains, especially for the top performers, not the ones that dont perform or a flaky as you call them. On the contrary, the flaky domains are the ones we do not want. We are selective on the domains that are accepted by the maximizer program, and many of our brand owner advertisers are buying the domain traffic because they know that it is targeted and it converts for them. The flaky domains do not convert are not the ones that stay on maximizer long, so no point just turning maximizer on those.

 

[Name Trader]

I wasn't recommending that anyone should remove Maximizer. I just want to prove for myself whether I get more, or less, revenue without it.

The reason that Maximizer has grown to 10-15% (from 1-2%) of my total revenue might well be, as you have said, that your partners are paying more than 20% more than the parking companies over the last year. It might be all the parking companies are in the same tank.

Which brings up the question, what is the revenue share on Maximizer revenues?

I am sorry if you are offended by my mentioning the death of your brother. The comment was not intended to convey any sort of offense. I have removed the offending remark. My condolences go out to his family.

 

[wolfis.com]

@ above : how about fixing your system that the control panel shows traffic and revenue for this year too , after all it is jan 02 and the control panel shows numbers until dec 31 and not any further .

half of your system does not work half of the time - so what makes you sure that the maximizer actually works ? - there is no control over it - it only gives the revenue but not where it comes from - i guess it is based on trust ? hmmmm - how about trust as for customer support or system reliability ??

ever few day when i log in it shows dozens of MY domains in ownership onlflict even so the whois clealry show me as the owner ( for many years )

so please just get you system fixed - will you ?

 

[decades80]

Stub I personally think that the above works well with the 1 month optimization, or lets say 2 months, when you see which parking provider pays more you simply park the names there... The problem is that some domains have rest time period of lets say 1 week to 10 days. The Above could just move them to bad parking provider because there was no click for a week. BUT if it hasnt be moved today, the click would accure tomorrow. IMO...I use Above for initiate optimization and than simply park the names and use it as a platform for statistics. I made some experiments and think this is the best at least for me.