PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

[ZOX]

Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread!

 

[rickkumar]

Thank you Donny, ah I see that it should be domainname={DOMAIN}

lol

Man, I am so bad in these things

 

[ekal]

Thanks for the info Donny.

Until today, I had about 200 Indian names at Parked. The RPC dropped from 0.10 to 0.1 overnight. Is this the new normal or could we expect a workaround and a return to something approaching the old numbers?

 

[rexvnus]

I have to move all of my international traffic domains to other parking company.

Can not accept 1 cent per click

 

[gwkg]

25 7 $1.20 28.00% $0.00 $0.03

7 clicks = 0.03 hmmm

Does anyone know where to move china domains?

 

[Phio]

oops!

 

[Semtex]

Question about Parked.com

Hello, I just recently switched all of my llll.coms from Sedo to Parked and I was wondering about something that happended on my second day. I am receiving around the same traffic as usual but on one specific name, in one day, I got 7 visitors and 95 clicks......in one day.

Can anyone explain how this happened? I am not complaining, but it just looks weird since I have never had that many clicks on one name in one day.

Thanks to anyone that answer this.

 

[firefly]

more than likely bot traffic. You won't get paid for it, if in fact it is a bot. If you read through the thread a bit (a few mentions in the last few pages I think) you find people commenting on these pesky little buggers

 

[v5x]

Anyone know if yahoo plans to support traffic from Portugal in the Future?

I'm sure this has been 'asked' somewhere, but could Parked.com not get a direct google feed (like sedo) as apposed to the ask feed for international traffic?

Cheers.

 

[raghudomains]

What is the CPC Rate at parked.com?

Hi friends what is the cpc at parked.com?

 

[Seabass]

Anyone know if yahoo plans to support traffic from Portugal in the Future?

That's a good question.

I have a quite a few Portuguese domains that receive traffic from both Brazil and Portugal and now I suppose the Portugal surfers have been nixed as a potential monetization force.

It may be the countries like Portugal that Donny listed don't add up to squat in clicks or conversions for the advertisers since they are mostly poor countres like Poland, Portugal, Chile, etc.... and Yahoo/Parked are not interested greatly in trying to monetize this traffic, but it would still be nice to have some kind of solution for this traffic.

I am somewhat confused about where this Portugal traffic is going. Is it going to one of the new 12 providers that Donny has done a deal with if we don't set an alternate traffic destination (ATD), or do folks in Portugal just see a blank white page without the ATD set.

.

I'm sure this has been 'asked' somewhere, but could Parked.com not get a direct google feed (like sedo) as apposed to the ask feed for international traffic?

Cheers.

I am speculating that part of why Google did this was to force domainers away from Ask and Yahoo and have them move to services like DomainSponser where Google would benefit from a fresh influx of international traffic and other traffic that will accompany those domains from a move. In other words - A backdoor attack on Ask and Yahoo's traffic by Google since many domainers may just move whole portfolios over to a Google feed sponsored parking company.

From what I have learned, it is against the TOS of both Yahoo and Google for a parking company to be running both feeds.
.

 

[domainpark]

I am speculating that part of why Google did this was to force domainers away from Ask and Yahoo and have them move to services like DomainSponser where Google would benefit from a fresh influx of international traffic and other traffic that will accompany those domains from a move. In other words - A backdoor attack on Ask and Yahoo's traffic by Google since many domainers may just move whole portfolios over to a Google feed sponsored parking company.

From what I have learned, it is against the TOS of both Yahoo and Google for a parking company to be running both feeds.
.

This is a good observation

Again only speculation on how and why google decided to renew a contract with ask.com and eliminate the option of parked domains.

If google has the more international traffic covergage that yahoo does not and they get rid of a third party where yahoo providers where utilizing ask.com for added international coverage stands to reason those with parked domains with international traffic were and are essentionally forced to go to a solo gooogle parking company.

Another google slap for domination?????

 

[NickRac]

is there any reason I should be getting $0.00 clicks? I have a total of 3 clicks on a domain during Thursday of last week. Usually clicks on this name yield 15-20 cents each.

All 3 clicks add up to $0.01 total for that day...

 

[Seabass]

This is a good observation

Again only speculation on how and why google decided to renew a contract with ask.com and eliminate the option of parked domains.

It's also ironic that domains convert better than search, and yet domains were cut as part of the renewal terms. That shows this was intentional, strategical move against competitors.

Even if the traffic from these countries suck as Google is apparently saying, wouldn't they prefer to have the "best" sucky traffic there is from domains, just to hold on to that small piece of pie to thwart competition like MS? I think they do want it. But they want to acquire it in an exodus of domainers over to a Google-friendly platform.

There are still rich poeple in these foreign countries amongst all the poor and the poor generally don't have computers and when the do use computers they use them in "Internet Cafes/ LAN Houses" close to their homes. I personally have never seen them surfing in these places for products, going to parked pages, etc..... they are just communicating with family, IM'ing friends, studying a school subject, etc..... they are not in the market to buy ANYTHING. So, my long-winded point is that it is mainly the middle class and above surfing in these countries for products and services and from my personal experience in observing them they are buying stuff, albeit less and with more trepidation at times.

There is a market there and I don't believe these countries are negligible. It is more likely a problem in linguistics, advertiser depth, lack of maturity of the penetration of Internet access, and lack of experience in using the Net - meaning few veteran surfers. That may be affecting the conversions for advertisers and it simply a temporary glitch until better methods and metrics come forth to approach these unique markets.

The market is there ; it may just not be being tapped correctly if conversons suck for advertisers.

If google has the more international traffic covergage that yahoo does not and they get rid of a third party where yahoo providers where utilizing ask.com for added international coverage stands to reason those with parked domains with international traffic were and are essentionally forced to go to a solo gooogle parking company.

Another google slap for domination?????

Also, it means they can pay what they want for international that makes the move since the competition is not picking up the slack (shame on Yahoo) and are letting that international traffic move to Google's payout scheme.

Google is loving this.

.

 

[fatter]

It's also ironic that domains convert better than search, and yet domains were cut as part of the renewal terms. That shows this was intentional, strategical move against competitors.

Even if the traffic from these countries suck as Google is apparently saying, wouldn't they prefer to have the "best" sucky traffic there is from domains, just to hold on to that small piece of pie to thwart competition like MS? I think they do want it. But they want to acquire it in an exodus of domainers over to a Google-friendly platform.

There are still rich poeple in these foreign countries amongst all the poor and the poor generally don't have computers and when the do use computers they use them in "Internet Cafes/ LAN Houses" close to their homes. I personally have never seen them surfing in these places for products, going to parked pages, etc..... they are just communicating with family, IM'ing friends, studying a school subject, etc..... they are not in the market to buy ANYTHING. So, my long-winded point is that it is mainly the middle class and above surfing in these countries for products and services and from my personal experience in observing them they are buying stuff, albeit less and with more trepidation at times.

There is a market there and I don't believe these countries are negligible. It is more likely a problem in linguistics, advertiser depth, lack of maturity of the penetration of Internet access, and lack of experience in using the Net - meaning few veteran surfers. That may be affecting the conversions for advertisers and it simply a temporary glitch until better methods and metrics come forth to approach these unique markets.

The market is there ; it may just not be being tapped correctly if conversons suck for advertisers.



Also, it means they can pay what they want for international that makes the move since the competition is not picking up the slack (shame on Yahoo) and are letting that international traffic move to Google's payout scheme.

Google is loving this.

.

personally i would like to see parked , fabulous and a few other big players go direct to advertisers, after advertisers see good conversions the sky would be the limit, of course google and yahoo wouldnt index parked domains but there are slowly burying us anyway

 

[GILSAN]

That's a good question.

I have a quite a few Portuguese domains that receive traffic from both Brazil and Portugal and now I suppose the Portugal surfers have been nixed as a potential monetization force.

It may be the countries like Portugal that Donny listed don't add up to squat in clicks or conversions for the advertisers since they are mostly poor countres like Poland, Portugal, Chile, etc.... and Yahoo/Parked are not interested greatly in trying to monetize this traffic, but it would still be nice to have some kind of solution for this traffic.

I am somewhat confused about where this Portugal traffic is going. Is it going to one of the new 12 providers that Donny has done a deal with if we don't set an alternate traffic destination (ATD), or do folks in Portugal just see a blank white page without the ATD set.
.

A few days ago I checked some of my domains randomly, clicked on some of the links and there were no ads showing (here in Portugal).

Today I did another random test on about 7-8 domains, clicked on at least 25-30 links and about 80-85% showed ads. The other links showed totally blank pages.

This shows that something has changed for the better, at least here in Portugal.

What amazes me from that country list that Donny posted, are the names of little islands that most people have never heard of and leaving out much more important countries.

Seabass if you want me to make any tests here in Portugal, let me know.

GIL

 

[domainpark]

personally i would like to see parked , fabulous and a few other big players go direct to advertisers, after advertisers see good conversions the sky would be the limit, of course google and yahoo wouldnt index parked domains but there are slowly burying us anyway

I am working on this very platform.

Hey who knows one day I may feed parked :hehe:

 

[Donny]

Seabass - It is against both Yahoo's contract to show a Google feed when Yahoo is on the page. Google in the past would allow me to get a non-exclusive deal for my own domains, but not for our parking domains. They both want to be A #1. If they aren't, then usually the don't want to play.

My take on the Ask problem was that I think that Ask got too big. Ask also had a search feed not a domain feed, which technically paid us more than what companies with a domain feed had. I think in some cases Google decided to get rid of Ask with the hope that everybody would jump to Google. I don't know of anybody who has just to Google yet. But Skenzo, Ask's largest customer jumped to Yahoo. So I'm sure that was a pretty nice blow to Google.

As far as the other countries, big or small they are all important. Our currently 12 providers are combined together to provide you with the highest priced clicks. We should be adding another 2-3 additional providers this week. Yesterday we had clicks from 195 countries to our new secondary feed. It does still have quite a lot of room for us to optimize the overall feed, which we have been doing on a daily basis.

Donny

 

[thetruman]

this is a sort of "transiction" period fo the parking industry.
I have to say that Donny shows lot of professionalism in his answer and is a most willing person. Parked is an excellent platform and you can tell that lot of work has been put on it. Also if revenue is going down I trust the company because of the people that run it.
I have understood that some changes will be on place (hopefully soon).
I feel this is much needed from parked because of the fast changing web environment; the parking pages start to feel their age; do you have any update on some new features that will improve the look/feel/traffic of the parked page?

 

[Phio]

Seabass,

While it is true that the global penetration of the internet is slow, partly due to Microsoft's delayed push of IE7 across the globe. You must understand that the US is now 2nd to China in terms of internet usage and page views. I am traveling to China in May for a friends pre-olympic celebration. We have set up a meeting with the Baidu reps. Should be interesting.

Keep your names at Parked.com They are the best paying site as of yet.

If Parked.com gets a Baidu feed it would be beneficial for all those with asian domains. It may not pay well now. But in the future it will. Not only have huge amounts of dollars, pounds and euros been flowing into china, china has been making huge investments in american companies and banks. There will be cross marketing in the future.

There will be other companies with broad international arms that will take the ball from the Giants of today. And when they do companies like parked will jump on the band wagon. It's too early now.

My advice is to keep those names parked, and begin to take a look at what the world will be purchasing in the next 10 years. The majority of purchases on the internet of the future will not be coming to the US and Europe. They will be coming from the other side of the world.

 

[Seabass]

Thanks for the clarification Donny! As always Parked is great company b/c of the attention to details. I'm looking forward to the new feeds.

Phio - I actually have no intention of moving away from Parked - even if the click prices crash to .01 on foreign I probably would not leave, since I don't trust Google, never have, and see this latest move as an direct attack on domainers as well, outside of the Yahoo/Ask slam show they just put on. Google, I suspect, wants (Yahoo, Ask, Parked, Domainers, etc....) us all ultimately to be cut off at the legs so as not to ever gain any traction to become "competitors". It's part of their end-game plan to be A #1 .

Also, part of the reason I am with Parked is b/c I want to help Yahoo and they have more relevant ads, the rest of the reasons are simply the great payout using Parked, ease of the interface, and customization features, and great service.
.

A few days ago I checked some of my domains randomly, clicked on some of the links and there were no ads showing (here in Portugal).

Today I did another random test on about 7-8 domains, clicked on at least 25-30 links and about 80-85% showed ads. The other links showed totally blank pages.

This shows that something has changed for the better, at least here in Portugal.

What amazes me from that country list that Donny posted, are the names of little islands that most people have never heard of and leaving out much more important countries.

Seabass if you want me to make any tests here in Portugal, let me know.

GIL

Thanks for the heads-up on that GILSAN - that is good info. to know. Thanks for the offer also.
.

 

[Phio]

I agree Seabass, it's strange that we (domainers) are getting slammed at this point in time by Google. I wonder if there are some scenarios that they have considered may hack away at their dominance; for example, lets say that a parking company x, begins to hold 10% of the top domains on the internet, and let's say that the decide to a) do direct business with the advertisers b) hook up with myspace, facebook or youtube, in a deal that provides all search traffic to go to their parked sites (becoming a standard in a way) or c) decide to create their own search engine to direct traffic to their own parked pages, and through some quirk of the times, begin to gain on google and yahoo's stronghold.

It may be the strategy of some of the parking companies are leaning towards because in the future, the big boys may cut off all feeds to parking companies. Then what are they left with????? Right now, nameservers are easily identified and nameservers can be easily banned.

I agree to keep your domains with parked. I'm just thinking of the future and what it could possibly bring.

 

[netmeg]

Domainers are getting slammed by Google (and Yahoo and MSN) because the advertisers and users are quite loudly demanding that they do so. Do parked domains convert? Maybe yes, maybe no, but who would know? The domain holders certainly have no way of knowing whether or not their domains are delivering sales; even the advertisers are not given that information by the search engines - you can find out exactly which sites on the various content networks are converting, but all domain ads get lumped together into one "domain ads" category, and usually the aggregate numbers for it are abysmal. That's the only information that the advertisers have, so that's what they base their perceptions on. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Don't believe me? Go visit some AdWords and YSM advertiser forums, and post something about parked domains, and see what happens.

And users (and webmasters) have been very vocal about not wanting their websites pushed down in the rankings by parked domains.

Until someone comes up with a way to increase the perceived value of parked domains to the advertiser, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

 

[Varon]

Google is getting slammed by domainers currently. We are not worthless. As Donny mentioned, Skenzo gave an appropriate kick to Google. I want them to be kicked even harder for their dictatorial commie ways. And with half of the PPC traffic down, Google will have an even lesser ad click ratio. My bet is that GOOG stocks will trade at $75 in 8 months. I mean, there won't be anyone at the Google forums to even bother about their conversion rates.

 

[Phio]

Yes I have been to those forums, and by lumping domain ads into a single category is doing a huge disservice to both the domain owners and the advertisers. For example lets say that you own CarLoanQuotes.com and an advertiser sees that this domain is directing lot's of converting traffic their car loans site. They may want to buy this domain directly from you for a good price. The may choose to continue parking it to increase traffic volume and some day decide to develop it for themselves.

Currently the way the situation stands the advertisers have been biased because of a number of things, one is the old way of parking which didn't match the ads as well as companies like parked.com are doing. Advertisers don't understand that the times are changing and most parked pages do contain relevant ads (they had a bad rap for a number of years)

My CTR for most of my parked pages at various companies has been over 25%.
What that means to me is that parked pages are getting more and more relevant (one in four clicks) and that advertisers just aren't getting it, they are actually probably getting more relevant customers from parking then they are from print ads in magazines (which is another issue)

In a perfect world, what kind of page do you think advertisers are looking for?

More blogs? Rich Content? How bout passing thru traffic from myspace? What do you think?

 

[netmeg]

I am an advertiser (on behalf of clients) - I spend about $80k per month on Google and maybe $20k on Yahoo.

What we want is traceable conversions at a price we can afford. That's pretty much it.