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.

 

[ResoluteDomains]

There is a problem with importing stats from Bodis since the 29th Dec. I can see an "unknown error" in the daily reports and $0.00 revenue. I mailed that issue to the support but no reaction till now. Have you got the same problem with the Bodis stats?

Same here. In fact, I tried to create a ticket at https://www.bodis.com/account#create-ticket;al[av=3776] and the ticket page is just clocking away, so no ticket has been created. Been doing that animated loading thing for about an hour already.

 

[Name Trader]

Assuming you are reporting the errors reported by above.com. If you reimport the Bodis earnings for the affected days, that problem goes away.

 

[ResoluteDomains]

Same here. In fact, I tried to create a ticket at https://www.bodis.com/account#create-ticket;al[av=3776] and the ticket page is just clocking away, so no ticket has been created. Been doing that animated loading thing for about an hour already.

Dangit. Meant to post that in Bodis forum. Sorry folks. FWIW, the problem that I was having at Bodis has been resolved.

 

[Kokoro]

The problem is fixed and all the Bodis stats have been re-imported successfully. Also received a nice email from the Above support explaining what had happened (it was a Bodis-side issue related to their recent system upgrade).

 

[pfloyd]

I personally love Above. I have used Above for almost 2 years. I direct traffic to Above and let it auto optimize. I have tried both above servers and direct servers and in my personal tests have not seen any real variance in traffic IMHO. As always trust your own data over others, but I feel that any minor under-optimization is worth the constant testing of different services. I note over the last few months there has been a big change in payouts over the different companies, and I am have had many domains that were with optimized with Voodoo for a long time moved to DS or even some of the smaller companies (this surprised me). If I did not have auto-optimization it would have taken me a while to catch on to this trend.

I disagree with the 3 parking company strategy as a hard rule, IMHO. I think you need to take into account the number of domains you have, the minimum payout of the parking companies, your domain niche, etc. I'm not saying if you own 25 domains you should have 8 parking companies....just that some thought should go into the number of parking companies based on your volume, goals and strategy. For new ideas sometimes I see what type of traffic a new parking company is looking for. For example: joined Dopa because they claimed they could monetize under performing Chinese traffic. Found a new niche. Broke even, ha, which is why I am sharing, but a source of new ideas.

I use Maximizer, but not for all domains. At first when I saw how much traffic Maximizer was pulling I shut it off because I was not getting ANY clicks on the traffic for my main niche (I only had 1 at the time), but great per click rates on a tiny fraction of the traffic on certain domains. I asked my above account manager (you can find contact info on your above dashboard) for a list of the most in demand keywords for Maximizer (my main niche was not on there btw). Then I created a new folder in the manage folders tab on the dashboard (I previously had all my domains in the default folder) and called it "maximizer". Then I went to "edit" on the manage folders page and turned off maximizer for my main folder and turned it on for the maximizer folder. Then I moved all my domains that matched the in demand keywords into that folder. End result: I only send in demand traffic to maximizer and treat it like I would any other parking service, only sending traffic that will perform with their service. I have been very happy with the results, but do not hit minimum payout every month. More like every 2-3 months due to the $100 minimum.

Finally I will say, do not hesitate to contact Above through their contact us page. They are not the fastest response, especially around the weekend but they do always respond...they have a good ticket system to handle issues.


Disclaimer: I don't disagree with anyone to step on their toes..or to try and sound smarter (I ain't) because most of my ideas and strategies have come from this site to begin with, but to try and share ideas back with the group...thanks NP community!

 

[Name Trader]

Sometime last year, I was getting so successful with Maximizer turned on I felt they were stealing traffic from my other parking providers. So I turned it off, and my revenue stabilized. I'm not accusing Above.com of anything. But I have now switch it back on for some domains.

 

[Name Trader]

I just had an interesting conversation about how optimizing (not maximizer) works at Above.com.

Above say it in general takes about 3 weeks to optimize a domain, with more than a few visitors. So lets just say 1 month for sake of illustration.

Above told me they can only optimize between 2 companies at any 1 time. The Primary and Secondary Services. So if you are like me, with 5 Service Providers, then it takes 4 months to fully optimize a domain between 5 Service Providers.

But what Above couldn't tell me was in which order these Service Providers were chosen to optimize. From my results below, it looks like they are chosen in alphabetical order, because from my test below, about half of my domains were with my worst 2 paying Service Providers, which are also the first alphabetically.

Now I want them to optimize overall the best two paying Service Providers, first, not last. They said it was not in their algorithms to do that. But they at least made me a suggestion.

They provided me a list of domains of my worst 2 paying Service Providers, where one or other of these two was the Primary Service Provider. It turned out that about half (or more) of my domains has one of these two as my Primary Service Provider. Well I was a tad shocked to see that, but not surprised since my whole account is undergoing optimization, and assuming the order they select providers to optimize, is alphabetically (rather than the best paying).

They told me to create a folder, and add all these domains to that folder. Turn auto optimizer off for that folder and then select which Service Providers I wanted to test and the percentage of visitors to send to each Service Provider. Now I could have got very sophisticated, with the percentages of revenues from all 5 of my providers. But decided to just share the visitors to my top 2 Service Providers, equally. Now after 1 month, I will add these domains back to the normal folders I use (which are auto-optimized), and they will then auto-optimize, all 5 Service Providers, already having the statistics from my best 2 Service Providers. I think this is a far better scenario, than trying optimize all these providers alphabetically, or with the worst payers first.

I liked this idea so much that I decided to open 12 folders from Jan-Dec, and add all new domains into the current month instead of the Default folder, and to share the traffic equally from my top 2 paying service Providers and then transfer them out on the first of the month following the month in which they were added. For example. Domains added in Feb would transferred out on 1st April. This gives between 4-8 weeks for the optimization between my best two paying providers.

Of course for any one domain, it's not to say my best 2 paying Service Providers, will be the best paying choice. But the probability, imho, is that it is more likely to be the case, than choosing the Primary and Secondary Service Providers randomly, or alphabetically.

Hope this tip is helpful to a few people.

 

[Hypersot]

Somehow I figured that above.com worked that way since the beginning of my domaineering and I was quick to create folders depending upon the optimization I wanted on each.
(For the record, I use 7 services: PC, DS, RM, Sedo ,Bodis, Voodoo and Namedrive)

What I have done, and seems like it's working for me, is:
-I have created one folder for each parking service I use with maximizer off
-I have also created one folder with Auto optimization again with maximizer off
-One folder with Auto Optimization with maximizer on
-and, finally, one folder for the domains that are dedicated to selling only (I use different templates and specific services for those)

Now,
whenever I add a domain and depending upon its traffic and niche. I move it around on using the folders I mentioned above and I monitor closely its performance for a short while (about a month)

-If I see that one parking service clearly outperforms the others then I leave the domain on that parking service for a while until I see a drop in performance in which I switch to the next best performer service.

-if I don't see any parking service standing out then I set the domain on Parking with Max off.

-if I after a while I'm not satisfied with the domain's performance then I move it to Park + Max folder where it stays until the end.

There are times where some domains perform really bad with some parking services. That's where I use the 'block' feature where I remove the not-so-good parking service from the domain's auto optimization.


Of course, for simplicity reasons, I don't include the keyword research etc. I do for every domain. That is just a general strategy on how I use above.com

hope it helps

 

[Name Trader]

@Hypersot - This in no way is meant as a criticism. Just a commentary. This seems to be a whole lot of manual intervention, for what is effectively an automated service. Arguably the automated service may be inferior to your manual method. Approx how many domains do you add a month? I buy domains for reselling (mainly) and for parking. I'm adding at least 50+ domains a month. This would be too much work for me to do manually, imho. Monitoring performance on a domain basis, month after month, like this, over 7 Service Providers. I let Above.com do all that heavy lifting.

I arrange my folders not by parking service but by revenue generated. All are auto-optimized and maximized. They are basically rough and ready measurements. Over $1 revenue over a 3 months period, between $0.01 - $0.99 revenue over a 3 month period, and zero revenue over a 3 month period.

I generally will renew any domain if it is making half it's renewal costs ($4) a year. There would be a few exceptions, if I thought it was a mistake to hold the domain any longer because the chances of a sale might be slim-to-none, or maybe it is a TM name (which I try not to hold). Of course I don't always get that right. HugeDomains captures about 20%+ of the domains I let drop. Not to say they have better insight than me, but of course I'm only just me, and they have build a huge business around buying and selling dropping domains. So you might expect them to have better judgement.

The domains earnings from $1-4/yr revenue, I make a judgement as to whether I think I can ever sell the domain. I have a lot of domains which might appeal to somebody for their personnel use. I'm beginning to drop those domains because the don't meet my price expectations, and keeping the domains which would appeal more to a commercial user (because they generally have more money to spend). I generally renew approx 25-50% of these domains.

For the domains earning from $0-1/year, most of them I don't own anymore. I use the same thought process as above, but probably renew approx only 10% of these.

My churn rate on my domains has gone up significantly with this strategy. I used to be a holder of my domains. But I came to the realization that this may not have been the best strategy.

Just a few words about Maximizer. When it went over 10% of my total revenue, I turned it off. There must be something wrong somewhere, if that level of revenue was beating my other Service Providers by 20%. At the same time I saw my total revenue going down. I just turned it back on, and it's gone back to a more normal 1-3% of my total revenues.

 

[Hypersot]

@stub
I do domaineering full time around 30hrs straight / day (*my* day that is)
if you think that's a lot of work then, just for info, that is peanuts compared to what I do *after* I add them to above.com lol

Everything I do is logged so as to study my actions at a later time.
Moreover, every domain I buy is getting archived along with ALL its metrics, as well as notes as to WHY I bought it, reg dates, fees, potential renewal fees which are calculated from a real time scan page I have made on excel (it scans different registrars and picks the cheapest ones)....etc. etc.

It will take me a week just to write down what I do in one of *my* days.

So, no, what I do in above is not too much work, it actually SAVES me a lot of time. My only concern is that, without above's parking management I'd be lost, that's for sure.

As for maximizer. I have some thoughts about it but I don't think this thread is appropriate for it.
If you want, pm me and we can have a chat in more detail.

btw. I'll think about your way also. I never thought of sorting my domains by revenue.

 

[Name Trader]

Sorting by revenue, at least gives you some ideas about your weaker domains which you might want to drop, or stronger ones which you'd want to keep. But I'm not saying that might replace your comprehensive strategies, or that you could not sort any/all your folders by revenue, and make the same decisions on a folder by folder bases. I think I'm buying better domains now than I did 4 years ago. But this will only be proved by future sales, and/or future higher parking revenues

 

[Teddy7]

Any ideas about Parklogik.com compared with Above.com ?

 

[Victor Pitts]

The "ww+number" in the URL from Above to the parking companies, indicates which parking service is being used. Below is a list of the more common parking service identifiers, but there are many more of them.

1 | SEDO
2 | DomainSponsor
3 | DomainApps
5 | NameDrive
6 | SmartName
10 | Fabulous
16 | Hitfarm
17 | Skenzo
23 | DDC
25 | Bodis
31 | DomainAdvertising
34 | Overdrive
35 | RookMedia
36 | InternetTraffic
38 | ParkingCrew
43 | Voodoo

 

[Victor Pitts]

Any ideas about Parklogik.com compared with Above.com ?

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.

 

[Name Trader]

The "ww+number" in the URL from Above to the parking companies, indicates which parking service is being used. Below is a list of the more common parking service identifiers, but there are many more of them.

That's interesting. I never thought about that before. Don't know why

 

[ResoluteDomains]

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.

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.

 

[Name Trader]

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.

I think that is something you should look up on the Above.com website or fire off a support question to them.

 

[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

 

[ResoluteDomains]

Thank you Victor.

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

 

[Name Trader]

I disagree with the 3 parking company strategy as a hard rule

I refer you to my "interesting conversation" above. Assuming for arguments sake, and being quite close to reality for the ordinary joe, it takes one month to optimize a portfolio. The problem is that Above can only optimize between 2 companies at a time. So that's 1 month. Add a third company is another 1 month, adding a fourth company, is another 1 month, adding a fifth company adds another 1 month. So if you have five companies, it takes 4 months to optimize your portfolio.

But hey, it gets worse. How do Above select the order in which the companies are optimized. They won't tell you. But from my non-scientific (observational) tests they take them in alphabetical order, not in the order of who has historically paid the most. In my case, the two lowest payers were both at the beginning of the alphabet. My revenue plummeted at least 50%+ after I triggered my account to be optimized, because all of a sudden my two lowest payers were the preferred destination of choice for the clicks. IMHO, they are sub-optimal in optimizing your portfolio with more than 3 parking companies. After correcting for this sub-optimal optimizing, my revenue went back to approximately where it was before.

As a consequence, as of today, I have discontinued DS and Bodis, leaving only 3 companies PC,RM,Voodoo.

Now Above.com argue I shouldn't do this because their optimization will always provide the best results. That may be true, until your portfolio needs to be re-optimized. Then you will lose out big time. And besides, I really don't want to deal with companies which are paying me low $x-xx a month. I'm happier one of my other companies takes over the responsibility, even if potentially, they pay me less.

 

[sirlordcomic]

NooB question here...Can I just add the Parking accounts in Above.com having added my domains to Bodis etc? Do I have to first have the domains active on Bodis for example, by pointing nameservers there? Then switch them to Above.com afterwards?

Right now all my uploaded domains on Bodis read "inactive".

Sorry confused...thanks!

 

[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).

 

[cocaseco]

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?