Dub.io - A new tool for parking your domains

[Kevin Johnson]

Hi guys,

My name is Kevin, been following this forum for quite awhile, but joined because I wanted to share a news. I am a VP of product at Dub.io, which is a small tool that our team has been building for a few weeks.

We wanted to see if we can create a new (and hopefully better) domain parking tool. We've named ourselves "Dub.io" - nice and short. It works like this.

1. Sign-up and you will get a website - to which, you can of course point your domain to. However, if you don't want to, that's ok. We will give you a Dub.io sub-domain.
   
   
2. Once that's done, you can start "populating" the site with contents. This can come from RSS feeds, YouTube videos or just from the web articles. Dub.io takes care of automatically crawling these and inserting into your site.
   
   
3. Each content can also be automatically tweeted to your designated Twitter account (this will usually bring more traffic and also get you some followers). You can also set up so that it's automatically posted to Blogger or Tumblr sites too.
   
   
4. And of course, you can monetize it. Right now, we allow you to insert your own Google AdSense ads and VigLink code. The best part? You keep all the revenue generated from your sites. We don't take anything.
   
   
5. Each site is all responsive to different screen-sizes. We try to include a variety of media types like images and related videos so contents are more engaging. Right now, we are in a "testing" phase, so everything is free! We would love for you to come and check us out and let me know if you have any questions.

Would love to discuss via this thread or if you have any questions, you can email me at hello @ dub.io

Thank you so much for your time guys.

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@tdwuk Let me look into this for you. I'll PM you directly so we can resolve this.

@stewmath Some of the ad platforms that are used are Amazon affiliates, Infolinks, yllix, VigLink. There are a LOT more. It actually doesn't have to be any ad network. You can find many affiliate banners offered by a variety of companies (e.g. GoDaddy or NameCheap have affiliate banners you can place).

@AGAME - Soon we'll have a showcase page where users can place their sites.

 

[adamson791]

Can anyone recommend the most effective ad platforms and ad types to use for these parked sites?

The issue I've found is that people will click on the article posted to twitter, facebook etc and come to my site. At that point, more often than not they will click on the green 'article' button to go straight to the external site after maybe reading the quick preview on the parked site.

That means that visitors are highly unlikely to click on banner ads due to banner blindness. The viglinks arent particularly useful as there isnt enough content on the page for viglinks to appear so they get very little clicks.

Then there are impression based CPM ads - in theory these should (atleast in my opinion) be the most effective, but there arent enough impressions here to really increase the CPM rate.

CPA based Content lockers could possibly work but the content has to be compelling enough for someone to want to perform an action to get access to the content on the parked site.

Im sure there must be an effective ad network or ad type mix that works well with dub.io type parked sites - but I'm struggling identify what they would be - any suggestions would be very much welcome!

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@adamson791

What we have learned is that there is no one silver bullet. That's good & bad. It's bad because you have to experiment a little - related to your domain, contents related to your domain all given over a certain period of time where traffic grows.

You can also experiment with our "pages" option. This would be more aligned with the traditional approach to domain parking where you show visitors your advertising items immediately. In that sense you're effectively removing the banner blindness that you mentioned because that's all your visitors will see.

If you have a domain that brings in decent amount of traffic naturally due to your domain being short & popular, what we have found is that, almost all types of advertising items work well since you have quite a large amount of traffic to work with.

Our motivation for creating sites is to build traffic with returning visitors over time thereby increasing the popularity of your domain + chance of ads being clicked.

I know that's probably not the answer that you're after. PM me directly or [email protected] any time and we can continue this conversation. Also note that, we are also constantly learning too, about all the different ad platforms and their performance.

 

[adamson791]

Thanks Kevin. According to GA, Im getting approx 250-300 unique visitors per day right now (up a few thousand percent each week) and is steadily increasing, so as traffic builds hopefully so will the clicks/impressions/affiliate leads etc and bounce rates reduce.

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@adamson791 Nice! We are also (always) looking into different ways of showing ads. It's a balancing act though. You don't want to bombard your sites with ads. Some ad platforms also have restrictions on how many ad items to show. And in general, visitors (or maybe everyone in general!) have negative view on ads (naturally so).

 

[hxp]

@Kevin Johnson

I've gotten nearly 50 "Going ok with Dub?" emails since 6 pm today, and they just keep on coming...

Please stop. x)

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@hxp Our biggest apologies - really sorry about that issue. Had a bit of melt-down on our email server today. Should be resolved now. Sorry again.

 

[hxp]

@hxp Our biggest apologies - really sorry about that issue. Had a bit of melt-down on our email server today. Should be resolved now. Sorry again.

All is well now.

 

[Kpett]

@Kevin Johnson - is there a way to turn off re-tweeting? I like being able to have the posted content tweeted, but some inappropriate content is being automatically re-tweeted.

 

[Kpett]

@Kevin Johnson - is there a way to turn off re-tweeting? I like being able to have the posted content tweeted, but some inappropriate content is being automatically re-tweeted.

Found it on the integration page ... just turned re-tweeting off.

 

[Kevin Johnson]

Hi @Kpett

Sorry about those retweets. We do filter out inappropriate tweets as much as possible but obviously it's not 100% full proof.

A better way would be for us to give you option to apply filters so that you can control exactly what can be retweeted.

Adding that to our list now.

 

[adamson791]

@Kevin Johnson is there a way to add tags in the auto post to tumblr? It would really help drive up a little more engagement and traffic if the posts could send auto tags to any specific topic or area of interest on tumblr. Thanks.

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@adamson791 Let me see if that's available on Tumblr API. If it is, then we'll add it!

 

[Kevin Johnson]

Added tags for the tumblr posts! We'll keep an eye out for the next tumblr post to make sure it works properly!

 

[offthehandle]

Hi @Kevin Johnson thank you, great support and all great new features keep coming.

1. Is it possible to have a global setting page showing all twitter accounts on which domains instead of selecting each domain individually with the drop down list? I wanted to disable retweeting like the guy earlier, but no batch process to do that. The same applies with the other screens, the ability to perform batch processes on selected domains would be helpful. Namesilo as a registrar for example has such a feature to allow changes in bulk. When I ad more domains this will become more cumbersome.

2. It would also be nice if additional news feeds were aggregated and added to the default, for example I have no interest in buzzfeed and must manually disable it. But would like AP and Reuters, instead at initial setup. In order to spread the content as more unique, other than tech only news would be helpful. Just an idea. There are thousands of great news feeds I have filtered and set up on the sites with filters. It works great, but to improve it would be nice to add say a picklist of keywords automatically when going to each feed manually.

3. Is there an export to txt file feature to allow all domains with their respective newsfeed and keyword data urls of all domains into one account? I would like to easily review the hundreds I have added and parse and edit this listing.

4. Can I place a url and of a jpg banner ad of my own that I can create and have it populate where the ad networks default to? I dont use adsense ir those other systems.

Not sure of complexity or scope of these, but just some ideas.
Thank you!

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@offthehandle

Thanks for your feedback + suggestions!

So... we do have a few bulk options, but you're right, they are limited at the moment. We are always thinking about what the best approach is to apply bulk actions while making sure that it doesn't make our tool overly complicated. Plus, there are times where a bulk-action is so specific and niche, we need to justify whether it's actually beneficial to the whole community.

Having said that, Twitter is a very popular feature so it would make a total sense to do a bulk option on this. Let me put it on the list and have a little think about it. Meantime, please PM me and tell me which ones you want to disable your re-tweet and we can do it for you. (or you can always email [email protected])

On your second point - I think a "global" setting is a good idea like you suggested. I'll also look into AP and Reuters to see what contents can be found there.

For exporting to TXT file - this is already on our list. Mind you there are many things to "export". And I presume you probably are considering "import" too.

And lastly, yes. You can add any type of ad items including a JPG banner. Let me know if you're having issue with this. Will help you through the steps.

 

[imadoer]

I dont get how to use this my landing page looks like crap

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@imadoer Sorry about the lack of information. I'll look into it, and then email or PM you directly to get this sorted.

 

[GoKaizen]

For simply creating an RSS aggregator Dub.io is great. Easiest solution I've seen.

Have you thought of adding SSL support?

 

[BrandPlease]

Yes, another for DUB.IO - check it out. Thank you, Kevin!