PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

[TOXX]

Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread!

 

[tonyfloyd]

anyone else's final #'s fall off a steep cliff yesterday after the updates?....

 

[Donny]

We started noticing the same thing as well lately. But for us we have seen it like the past 3 weeks or so.

Donny

 

[GoPC]

Solid clicks for me the past few days.

This is me Happy

Scott

 

[vanbollu]

Okay......it does look like the changes are working so far.

Here's one domain for yesterday......three uniques, six clicks:

3 6 $16,796.67 200.00% $8.40 $50.39

Thanks Parked.com !

.

Great!

 

[opalxx]

anyone else's final #'s fall off a steep cliff yesterday after the updates?....

Mine fell off a steep cliff a couple of months ago. Never seen so many .01c rpc's. Never had them before. Definately hit rock bottom for me, and no, they are not adult names.

 

[BizBot]

I got paid by Parked and WhyPark today.

Twice is nice!

 

[411domains]

RPC Down | Keyword Issues | Content Issues

Mine fell off a steep cliff a couple of months ago. Never seen so many .01c rpc's. Never had them before. Definately hit rock bottom for me, and no, they are not adult names.

I'm with you there on this one. After the WhyPark acquisition my stats fell tremendously.

I have a LOT of domains at Parked.com. I just like the simplicity and once upon a time I liked the RPC.

It's a little disappointing that domains that were producing decent results are now producing squat. The traffic is still there, the clicks are still there. Some were averaging $2-$5/Click. Now...Pennies.

To make matters worse. While doing my periodic domain check, I noticed that some of the keywords had been changed, which in turn, changed the template and ultimately creating content not relative to the domain.

I also noticed that the content on gaming related domains aren't even relevent to the domain and cannot be altered.

Example: OnlineCasinoSecurity(.)com
Current Keyword: Online Casino (domain split)
Link Content shown: Las Vegas Related

If I were to plug in the keyword elephant, it would still show all vegas related links.
I believe that has something to do with yahoo, but not 100% sure.

Additionally, all of my one click landers turned into 2 click landers.

I've enjoyed Parked.com for quite some time now and have had nothing bad to say about the services. I just hate seeing the traffic and the clicks there but no revenue. Especially on the domains formerly known as high RPC domains.

When you have as many domains as I do, it takes a considerable amount of time to get them optimized.

I don't know guys. It's a tough biz these days.

Donny, if you could get back to me on how I get more accurate links or at least change them on the gaming domains, I would appreciate it.

 

[DnPresident]

To make matters worse. While doing my periodic domain check, I noticed that some of the keywords had been changed,

Additionally, all of my one click landers turned into 2 click landers.

Some of my keywords changed but not too bad in my case... Some of my names that were 1 click landers are now 2 click landers as well, and they were pretty good category killer type names. At first it was just the odd/ugly extensions but recently I've seen some .org and .net change as well. Oh well:tu:

 

[Donny]

411domains - Casino domains have always been this way since we launched parked. It's a requirement by Yahoo. Since online casinos are illegial in the US. The formula for 1 click has always been decided by Yahoo as well. It's always about how many advertisers they have for a particular keyword and how good the domain is.

As of yesterday we still had more than 100k domains that went to a 1 click lander that received a hit yesterday. So there are still domains out there like that.

Donny

 

[AWRosey]

I just calculated my revenue for the 11 days prior to the 27th (July 16 - 26) against my revenue figures for the 11 days since (July 27 - Aug 6th).

5.5% Revenue Increase
2% CTR Increase.

Good deal.

L2

Interesting excercise L2. I decided to check my portfolio's performance over the same period.


24% Revenue Decrease
26.4% RPM Decrease
17% CTR Increase
33% RPC Decrease


The killer is the RPC decrease. Because this was never really high for my portfolio, a couple of pennies decrease really kills it. I agree that this 11 day test sample is too small of a sample to draw a conclusion, so I will also keep an eye on this as well as the days increase.

Alan

 

[Donny]

Alan,
Based on what we changed, it's technically impossible to have less RPC. The changes we made which mainly affected US traffic for now, but will affect other countries over the next week or so.

I would recommend looking at your top domains one at a time, instead of your overall account and see how things work. Another issue, it looks like some of your domains have been recently been banned by Yahoo, so they may be going directly to our secondary providers as well.

I do think checking your overall account from one time period to another is a great idea, but you should always look at your top domains as well, I mean the domains that make money every single day.

Donny

 

[AWRosey]

Alan,
Based on what we changed, it's technically impossible to have less RPC. The changes we made which mainly affected US traffic for now, but will affect other countries over the next week or so.

I would recommend looking at your top domains one at a time, instead of your overall account and see how things work. Another issue, it looks like some of your domains have been recently been banned by Yahoo, so they may be going directly to our secondary providers as well.

I do think checking your overall account from one time period to another is a great idea, but you should always look at your top domains as well, I mean the domains that make money every single day.

Donny

Donny:

Unfortunately, I had in the back of my mind that a possible reason for my poor performance had to do with banned sites. I just didn't want to believe it. I need to go through my portfolio and check them out one by one and move these banned sites elsewhere or get rid of them.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't meaning to cast a dark cloud over the changes. I just thought Lumpy's comparison was interesting and thought I'd do it myself. My last three months at Parked have been acceptable given my meager portfolio.

Alan

---------- Post added at 02:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:33 PM ----------

What a difference a proper sample makes. I just completed the same exercise as before, but this time just using my top 5 producing domains. I also included yesterday's finalized numbers and made it a 12 day comparison.

43.3% Revenue Increase
49.5% RPM Increase
37.2% CTR Increase
Flat RPC

Mucho Better :tu:

Thanks again for the insight Donny.

And BTW, I am also very pleased with my performance at Whypark. I am in the process of moving all of my underperforming domains over to there to give them a much needed shot in the arm.

 

[Domagon]

...The problem at this juncture is that if earnings drop anymore, then this industry will more or less crumble. It is already...... even the big boys are caving, so this Fall will be the most important bellwether in this industry ever......IMHO. Ad revenue is moving to the Net, but it is not being passed on by Yahoo. They have also decided that a click for some rich family in Argentina wanting to spend two weeks in a Dubai Hotel at $1,400 a night is only worth a .01 click (hypothetical, but you get the idea)

It's worse than that - many advertisers shun ad placement on parking pages; won't pay much for it.

Not to say parking is dead - some folks, with strong domains, still earn a mint, and likely will continue to for the foreseeable future. But for most parkers, with marginal / average domains, the writing is on the wall ... develop the domains or drop/sell them.

IMHO, Parked is in a bad position - too reliant on search engines that dislike the parking business and divert much potential parking traffic away - ie. Google's interactive keyword helper search bar.

An answer to that threat is Parked developing its own branded quality product / services portal (maybe utilizing some of the backend of the WhyPark platform) and selling ad placement directly to advertisers...

And for the portal to attract advertisers / be credible, redirect parking pages to the portal domain and/or have the parked domains resolve to a subdomain of the portal branded domain - that's a tradeoff for domainers seeking to build a brand of their own (that includes se listing; redirected domains likely wouldn't be listed / sandboxed), but most parking webmasters don't customize their domains nor care much if their domain is SE listed - they just want to park and earn revenue ... for many, the branded portal approach could be fine; perhaps less visits, but more revenue.

The reason to redirect (and/or to a sub-domain of) the portal branded domain is to sell advertisers - a high paying advertiser is more likely to advertise / pay more to have their ad shown on a large, well known branded website owned and operated by Parked itself than some random parking page on some random domain. Hope this all makes sense.

Ron

 

[Donny]

Ron,
We are already working on a system to sell ads directly to advertisers. We already have about 10 direct advertisers that we work with and it is good to keep out the middle man sometimes. It will take us a few months to get everything ready. We have some people who have tried us to add CPA offers to our system, I personally have never liked them because they just don't pay in most cases. We are keeping our options open though. Maybe we will create the next adwords.

Donny

 

[Sameh]

Same Experiment:

17.41% Revenue Increase
9.35% RPM Increase
3.75% CTR Increase

 

[ebatcave]

Same Experiment:

17.41% Revenue Increase
9.35% RPM Increase
3.75% CTR Increase

I also tried it on 20 consistently producing domains using the same time periods L2 gave. Since the number of visitors increased 11% during the period as well, I performed a ratio calculation to make the number comparisons a little more fair. Here's what I got:

17.9% Revenue Increase
3.06% CTR Increase
5.48% RPM Increase
15.07% RPC Increase

I hope they gave Donny a raise (or at least a new ski boat) coming up with this! :kickass:

 

[Donny]

The numbers are looking even better this week than last week. Hope everybody is seeing the same thing we are as well.

Donny

 

[TOXX]

The numbers are looking even better this week than last week. Hope everybody is seeing the same thing we are as well.

Donny

Who would've thought such a small change in reality would have such profound effects!
...
I'm lovin' it though! :kickass:

 

[mdesigner125]

Yahoo Changes

Just got this from Yahoo on the advertising end, will be interesting to see how it translates to the parking side....

"Dear Advertiser,

As you know, when you advertise with Yahoo!, your traffic can come from both Yahoo! sites and partners' sites in our distribution network. As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen our marketplace, Yahoo! plans to soon expand the adjustments we make to click charges based on our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network. This will include deeper discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic, and potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic. We expect to launch this enhancement in late August or early September 2009.

This change is designed to further align your click charges with the performance of the traffic that you receive.

How this Affects Your Account
These adjustments will be based on our assessment of the performance of the traffic source, and will not be affected by the quality of your ads. Based on our analysis, we expect that most advertisers will see click charges drop or remain unchanged, while a small fraction of advertisers may experience an increase in click charges.

As always, you will never pay more for a click than the amount you specify as your bid (including any bid adjustments you may make for desired audiences).

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing "

 

[Donny]

I was first told about this about two weeks ago and I still don't have much information. But the only thing I do know is that if you have a low TQ, you will probably be paid much less than before.

Donny