How can we break stranglehold of Google and Yahoo

[rodash]

It amazes me that there are so many domain names being parked, with vast sums of money being derived from people clicking on advertising links, yet domainers are being paid a pittance by parking companies that have deals with Google (Ask.com) and Yahoo.

I am being paid 3 to 10 cents a click on my top-earning parked names yet I know that Google and Yahoo's clients are paying them 60 cents to $3 or more per click. I know this because I have run advertising campaigns on both Google and Yahoo and have paid those figures. On Google I can't get any kind of click placements for less than 70 cents. More realistically, I can't get click placements where traffic volume is concerned for less than $1.50. On Yahoo, I can get click placements for 15 cents on some obscure terms but on popular keywords I'm paying over 50 cents. On fashion keywords I can't get placements for less than 50 cents so why am I being paid 3 cents for clicks on my fashion domains? I can't believe these pitiful payouts are all put down to click fraud. I don't believe that. I think that's just a furphy put out by these companies to lower domainers' income expectations.

If someone can come up with a scheme whereby they can go around these greedy monoplies, and pay domainers a fair deal, they will create a revolution. If this can't be done then parking has no future. The answer to this is to eliminate the reliance on clicks. Click-through has become a great device for companies like Google and Yahoo. They can use it as a magnet to pull in advertisers yet they use it as a stick to beat domainers over the head. We need to revert back to a model whereby advertisers pay a fair price to appear on a generic domain name that attracts targetted traffic. We've let the likes of Google and Yahoo takes us away from this type of model, to our great disadvantage.

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[.X.]

We Can't, I don't know of any other way to put it.

 

[fatter]

There is only one way to do it and thats for all the parking companies and domainers who make minisites to get together with all there domains and go directly to advertisers with a 50/50 cut. Most parking companies already talk at the conferences, I would think parked domains and minisites make up at least 15 percent of all business on the web. It would need tight control to prevent fraud etc.

 

[Varon]

The only way we could do it would be to have around $250 billion to buy out both these companies. We need to takeover.


Okay, now on a serious note..... there is one way I've been thinking of for a long time. We unite with atleast half a million domains with millions of impressions and go the Marchex way...ie; we set up a PPC program and divert our traffic. It would need lots of hardwork but it could make us better off in a years time. And we can surely go public with portfolio holders getting some equity holdings too. I know this is extremely ambitious but it is workable. It can honestly scare the daylights out of G. Once advertisers see great conversions....the sky is the limit. All we need is to provide consistent good non fraudulent traffic.

 

[PowerUp]

The only way we could do it would be to have around $250 billion to buy out both these companies. We need to takeover.


Okay, now on a serious note..... there is one way I've been thinking of for a long time. We unite with atleast half a million domains with millions of impressions and go the Marchex way...ie; we set up a PPC program and divert our traffic. It would need lots of hardwork but it could make us better off in a years time. And we can surely go public with portfolio holders getting some equity holdings too. I know this is extremely ambitious but it is workable. It can honestly scare the daylights out of G. Once advertisers see great conversions....the sky is the limit. All we need is to provide consistent good non fraudulent traffic.

I'm interpreting your "PPC program" as setting up a parking company. In my opinion, having some negotiation power will help increase $$ in the short-term only.

The long term solution is to have the advertisers pay directly to the domainers, or we become the middleman ourselves. We become Google and Yahoo. Why would advertisers come to us?

1. Because we are a coalition or union of thousands of domainers and we control millions of domains and millions of visitor traffic.
2. Because we charge less than what Google / Yahoo charges for the same keywords, same exposure, same conversion rate. Lets face it. In the end, it's all about ROI. With a lower CPC, the ROI is higher.
3. Because we deal with click fraud.

As a coalition or a union, we already control the traffic. And advertisers go where the traffic is.

As it is now, because the domainers are not in unity, thats why the Middleman Google could take advantage of the domainers (and the advertisers).

Advertisers don't know where to go except going to Google or Yahoo. You can't be expecting them to approach thousands of domainers even if they wanted to cut out the middleman. I am sure the advertisers would like to bypass the middleman as well if the domainers could get together and come up with a systems to serve targeted ads, deliver targeted traffic, handle receipts and payments.

 

[johname]

When advertisers hear the name "domainers" they image people with very subpremium domain names and them clicking on their own names. And google and yahoo tells the advertisers that only they are big enough to police the domainers.

 

[Varon]

I'm interpreting your "PPC program" as setting up a parking company. In my opinion, having some negotiation power will help increase $$ in the short-term only.

The long term solution is to have the advertisers pay directly to the domainers, or we become the middleman ourselves. We become Google and Yahoo. Why would advertisers come to us?

1. Because we are a coalition or union of thousands of domainers and we control millions of domains and millions of visitor traffic.
2. Because we charge less than what Google / Yahoo charges for the same keywords, same exposure, same conversion rate. Lets face it. In the end, it's all about ROI. With a lower CPC, the ROI is higher.
3. Because we deal with click fraud.

As a coalition or a union, we already control the traffic. And advertisers go where the traffic is.

As it is now, because the domainers are not in unity, thats why the Middleman Google could take advantage of the domainers (and the advertisers).

Advertisers don't know where to go except going to Google or Yahoo. You can't be expecting them to approach thousands of domainers even if they wanted to cut out the middleman. I am sure the advertisers would like to bypass the middleman as well if the domainers could get together and come up with a systems to serve targeted ads, deliver targeted traffic, handle receipts and payments.

By PPC I don't mean a parking company. I mean a company like ABC Search, Marchex, etc.

 

[metronome]

@varon
Marchex is pretty new to me, didnt know that name till now
care to explain me what they do that if we follow its ways we can scare google/yahoo?

 

[dherwan]

I hope there is a rich domainer could make this thing happen.

 

[shockie]

maybe you should think of it this way: without google or yahoo, you would be making a lot less (zero?) from parking. heck, parking might not even exist!

 

[enlytend]

I am being paid 3 to 10 cents a click on my top-earning parked names yet I know that Google and Yahoo's clients are paying them 60 cents to $3 or more per click. I know this because I have run advertising campaigns on both Google and Yahoo and have paid those figures.

You can't assume that all advertisers are charged the same bid prices as yourself...

Minimum bids are based on a number of factors - relevance of ad and landing page to the keyword, matching options, CTR, ad placement... It's very possible you have competitors paying much less for those same keywords.

 

[rodash]

I liked the responses of Varon and PowerUp. You guys are thinking in the right direction. The trouble is that we need the catalyst for change, and how that happens is the $6 million question. It's interesting that Matt tried to beat these buggers by becoming his own parking company, with Bodis, and for a while that looked promising with PPC payments averaging just under 30 cents, but now that average is down to less than 10 cents and we are seeing more and more payments of 3, 4, and 5 cents. Ask.com has obviously put the screws on - under the pretext of click fraud - so it remains to be seen whether he can get those PPCs back to a reasonable level.

Unless someone comes along who can think big picture and put something in place along the lines of what PowerUp has suggested, then I think we are left with optimising these names ourselves ... on a name-to-name basis.

One of the things I thought of was "keyword blocks". Say you have a block of 2000 domain names all pertaining to loans. The block is made up from loans domains owned by lots of different domainers. You could then approach a leading financial institution and offer them a URL redirection of the 2000 names. All names would point to their site. The financial institution pays $??? for that service based - not on the number of clicks it's getting, but the likely number of leads it could get from traffic generated by 2000 domain names. This would move things away from the dreaded click basis of payment. The payment is divided up among domainers. The only issue then is how to divvy up the cash, on what basis you assess the domains included in the block. That's the hard one.

Does any of this make sense?

..

 

[fatter]

I liked the responses of Varon and PowerUp. You guys are thinking in the right direction. The trouble is that we need the catalyst for change, and how that happens is the $6 million question. It's interesting that Matt tried to beat these buggers by becoming his own parking company, with Bodis, and for a while that looked promising with PPC payments averaging just under 30 cents, but now that average is down to less than 10 cents and we are seeing more and more payments of 3, 4, and 5 cents. Ask.com has obviously put the screws on - under the pretext of click fraud - so it remains to be seen whether he can get those PPCs back to a reasonable level.

Unless someone comes along who can think big picture and put something in place along the lines of what PowerUp has suggested, then I think we are left with optimising these names ourselves ... on a name-to-name basis.

One of the things I thought of was "keyword blocks". Say you have a block of 2000 domain names all pertaining to loans. The block is made up from loans domains owned by lots of different domainers. You could then approach a leading financial institution and offer them a URL redirection of the 2000 names. All names would point to their site. The financial institution pays $??? for that service based - not on the number of clicks it's getting, but the likely number of leads it could get from traffic generated by 2000 domain names. This would move things away from the dreaded click basis of payment. The payment is divided up among domainers. The only issue then is how to divvy up the cash, on what basis you assess the domains included in the block. That's the hard one.

Does any of this make sense?

..

trafficavenue tried something similar a few years back, I think they were ahead of there time, basically when someone landed on the name companies would bid for traffic to be redirected to their site, one of the problems was when a company paid for the traffic then subsequent endusers werent aware they could bid