Wow
Hello everybody,
Sorry I didn't reply earlier. I'm usually lightning fast
, but I'm based in Europe, so the post came at 7pm on Friday evening and then I was forced to take a day off by my girlf yesterday! So Sunday it is then.
I wanted to keep my posts shorter, but there's so much to write here that this is going to be giant. I'll then pick off any subsequent questions one by one:
Thanks for the intro TT. It was great to see your posts when I first got onto NP, so it's good to know we already have some fans on here.
I would be interested to know one thing I had 2 domains at sedo for over a year and for a combined total in one year they had just over 300 visits. On Dec 1 I parked these same 2 domains at namedrive ( and you can check my account to verify if you like) these same 2 domains are showing a combined total of 1333 and 784 respectively how can this discrepancy be logically answered?
The thing with the traffic is certainly an odd one. As I said in my other post, Google doesn't allow us to do any serious SEO or to promote the page in any way other than simply 'parking' it. Uniques are counted differently across the board, but there are normally not such large fluctuations. Like I said in your PM, if you let me know the names, then I'll have a look into them. I'm very interested to see what's going on. People do seem to get more traffic with us than with Sedo, however, this is a huge difference. I certainly wouldn't suggest that Sedo are somehow 'conning' you - they get the earnings from your traffic too, remember. Are the hits still so high? Is the traffic converting.
(this is where I first mentioned the issue)
http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=142715&page=3
1) When / How will a member of ND be notified if they fall within the first 50,000 domains at ND and if a person falls within this category how and where does the extra bonus show?
Good news and bad news here. Depending how you look at it.
In our first week in September, we changed this from adding a 10% bonus onto the first 3 months' earnings to actually upping our entire revenue share by 10'%. This means that your 10% bonus is basically being paid every day you park with us.
We realised it would be too hard to find which 50,000 domains had been added first, parked with us, taken away, moved back etc.
Not only that, but we wanted to give an extra 10% to everyone as this is such a cut-throat market that we knew we had to push our Rev Share as high as we feasibly could without robbing ourselves of a livelihood. For those of you getting your calculators out, 10% extra revenue share actually works out better than a 10% bonus on top of a 10% lower revenue share
The more good news is that we are keeping this revenue share at this level for the future, despite our first 3 months being up.
I suppose this ties in nicely to Dave's question:
I would also like to know this...
Also, what is the actual percentage split?
We have never actually revealed our rev share. Like I say, we are active on 4 or 5 boards around the world, this can be gleaned from another board and the reasoning behind our stance on this matter is as follows:
1. For our own protection: There are several Google syndications now and we don't want to declare to the world 'we are paying XX% revenue share' as it gives them an easy handle to see exactly just why we are beating them...
2. What exactly is a 90% revenue share? You see companies saying 'We'll pay out 90%, 85%, 95% even 100% revenue share. But that's a percentage of what exactly? Every parking company counts views, clicks etc differently. Some chuck away 50% of your clicks, some hit Google but don't hit your account, some show double the traffic of others, some keep a percentage of revenue for themselves before it even gets round to 'sharing' the rev upfront etc. We feel our views/clicks model is extremely accurate in terms of what Google also maps and therefore our high revenue share will make people better off in the long run.
3. We're not going to make any promises we can't keep. We feel that it's impossible to operate when paying out, for example 95% revenue share, so if someone's offering that, go to them and come to us when they go bust...
4. We are the new kids on the block: We HAVE to impress. We can't just give people pretty pages and hope they enjoy their extra one or two cents in their account. We have to make people say "wow, pretty pages, high CTR AND significantly higher PPC". We don't have the luxury of sitting back and watching the cash roll in. We have to fight to make sure we squeeze every cent we can out of your domains. This said, I can therefore guarantee that we pay out a high revenue share to all our clients. We don't cap our payments, if you get a 10$ click, you keep every bit of your commission on it, it's not capped to $2.50 for you and $7.50 for us.
That said, we pay out as high as we reasonably can. We're not greedy and we don't have the luxury of being in the market for a long time that we can live of our previous years' reputation.
2) Will and When will there be an affiliate program associated with ND?
Monday, I hope. This has been a long time coming, but we are finally ready to roll out it out. It's just going through the final test phase now.
3) I have been 100% happy with your program since day one if you had the chance to say one thing to a proposed new member what would it be?
Would it be your user interface? Would it be the honest and TRUE unique counts?
Would it be that you provide the best % for the domain owner?
Would it be the fact that from what I can tell so far that your business is really on the up and up meaning you dont steal anything from your members like other PPC programs
This almost feels like a set up...
I'd say it's a combination of everything that we are achieving. We cannot keep everyone happy and I'm sure there are people reading this who have been less impressed than yourself about our services. As I have said before, we cannot be everything to everyone. Our main strengths are that:
- We try to be as transparent as possible without lessening our competitive edge.
- We pay as high a revenue share as possible but never subsidize low clicks to make people happy. We show exactly what Google show us. This means that you can get some very low clicks with us, but it also means we don't have to take earnings from your mid- to high clicks to pay for the subsidisation of the lower clicks.
- We are constantly changing, innovating, bringing in new tools. This won't stop.
- We try to be as responsive and pro-active to all customer queries as possible. We have over 1,000 customers and just a handful of personnel, but we try to answer every email within 12 hours and gladly take on any suggestions.
- We have a unique interface where you can divide your larger portfolios into folders. You can see stats per ad region as well as what people are searching for in the search box on your domains, assisting optimization. We have a powerful optimization tool and you can optimize your domains as much or little as you like. We also have over 25 headers to choose from. Our interface is now getting so powerful and comprehensive that we are rolling out a new FAQ very soon
Do you pay for clicks outside US adequately for it's ADWords (or whatever ad system bid) price or just some cents ?
The comparison of AdWords and parking pages is always an interesting and never-ending issue. How can you see $15 bids in Google and only get a $0.10 click? This is something that can be discussed in an entirely different thread as it's so intricate. I can't comment on the Spanish Adwords bid prices, but I can say that a click on a parked page is not simply a click on an Adword advert, it is dependant on several factors - which advert does the person click on?, do they search for something in the search box that is lower-paid? etc.
I can only give you a guarantee that we pay out, less our share, exactly what Google, in all their wisdom, pay us.
I've had a quick look in our back office and found that we have two, yes, two click on a .es hosting ad. This is 33 cents. However, it's not exactly a great test as it's only 2 clicks out of millions.
On another note, if you're optimizing domains for a non-English audience on NameDrive, then it's best not to set any categories and simply select a keyword and a header.
I'm not too sure about a few basics, like should the keyword be "adult" or "sex", with adult names? - and under the heading "ad types", what should be pressed, "1 click" or "portal"?
"Sex" is normally good. Here's another bit of info from another forum about portal vs 1-click:
The portal is mainly good for domains where you are not really sure about what the content of the site should be or for domains that are more informational than 'sales' - e.g. searchanything.com would be better on a portal than cars.com which is better-suited to one-click page. I'd say that most people should have around 90% of their names on the one-click option as the CTR is generally higher.
I'd also be interested in knowing how ND compares with Fabulous.
I know that I should spend time snooping around other parking companies' member areas, but I have enough stuff with our own system to deal with. As far as I know, our optimization tool is stronger than at Fabulous - you can choose any relevant keyword you like with us. Fabulous are well-known for doing extremely well in some areas (casino) etc but I am sure that we outperform them in others. I would have to defer to anyone on here who has tested both services. As I've stated before, spreading your individual domains across different companies is really the best way to optimize your parking earnings.
They do have a better name than us, though. There is no better-named company in the industry than Fabulous
Right, I think that's enough for now. Even I'm getting a bit bored of reading through it, so I suppose you all are as well. You can blame my girlfiend for it being so long!
I look forward to hearing all your views, good or bad, on NameDrive. We are still pretty much minnows in the market, but we are certainly on the up with the help of people such as you, so everything you have to say to us is vital.
I'm going to have a lie down.
Have a great Sunday.
Ed
