PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

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Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread! :)
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
AfternicAfternic
No, there's no way, and yes, you can't. It's up to you to do the research, ask around, and pick a company you can trust.

But if they ALL do it this way, how can you do the research and pick a company you can "trust"? I mean seriously, all you are really doing is picking a company that you hope will give you a bit more than another, but TRUST has little to do with it, doesn't it?

And incidentally, it's pretty close to the same situation you'll get with AdSense, YPN or MSN adCenter ads.

This is kinda my point... and doesn't make any one of us feel any better. The only truth is that the lack of accountability is widespread and the "right" of these companies to withhold the information from us, THEIR producers.

For example, many MANY people were shocked and angry about one such publisher only paying for the 1st click and keeping the revenues from any subsequent clicks a visitor might make.

What, exactly, is the logic to this? They still charge the advertiser for the clicks only they just choose NOT to pass on the revenue share. Furthermore, none of us agreed to that policy in the TOS. They STOLE many thousands of dollars from each and every one of us every single day and their response? "Oh, well, we can and if you don't like it, go somewhere else".

Where else? Who else is doing this? Do we or will we ever know just how many clicks we are NOT getting paid for at all, let alone getting ripped from?

And oh yeah, there's the "ask these kinds of questions and we'll find a reason to ban your ass, without or without cause, you have no recourse".

Which is nothing short of blackmail and extortion. Seriously, what other industry (other than the Government) has this kind of carte blanche operational standard? They do whatever they want, don't have to tell us or explain to us or to prove anything to us and if we get to inquisitive, they cut off completely... Anyone???

I'm not saying Parked is bad... I mean, how would we every really know if they were? I'm just saying that it is really hard to believe and trust these companies that have no accountability, no proof and go out of their way to ensure that you will never know.

What is there to hide and why go through such extraordinary efforts to hide what they say is nothing to hide?

How about setting the bar a little higher, eh?

Why not include in our stats, what the advertiser paid, what source publisher is charging, what the PPC sub-distributor is charging and then our final take on the click? Why not? If we are to only get 2% of the click, then just say so and let us make up our mind if it's worth staying put.

I got two clicks a couple of days ago for .01 cent. Clicks are now 1/2 cent? I know that the advertiser is paying more than twice that. I looked at the keyword costs. Where's the rest of it going? Just say. Don't give us reason to doubt. Rate fluctuate, sure... I get that... but YOU KNOW what they are for that click, just POST IT in our stats. They have to have that data in order to asses the end click value anyway... so SHARE IT with us.

Is that really so much to ask? PPC companies have thousands of users, Millions of clicks a day, maybe even 10s of Millions of clicks a day... who knows? Do you?

If they skim off just a few pennies off the top of 100,000,000 clicks a month... what's that worth and is that motivation enough to just treat us like mushrooms (Keep us in the dark and feed us crap)?

Eventually, someone is going to take this to a legal sphere to demand representation and clarification. Then, regulation is going to happen and with that, the death of the industry. It's inevitable.

These companies can make it a whole lot easier on themselves to just be honest and transparent... if they can't, then I would question WHY and whether or not they have to much to loose at this point.

It's a conversation worth having.
 
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Well stated, GoPC. You speak for many of us who feel the same way.
 
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Let me clarify a few things. First, today, I am not a PPC company, today I am only a domain parking company. I get my ads from other providers, in some cases I am told on a domain level what somebody makes, in some cases I am told on an account level what somebody makes, and in other cases I am told what everybody makes as a whole. This is all I am provided.

Let's take somebody who is on this formum quite a bit, but I won't mention names. Yesterday one of our providers didn't pay him for 42 or 16.67% of his clicks on one domain. Why? Hell if I know, they all seem legit to me. But as Yahoo/Google and the other PPC companies continue to fight fraud this is something that does and will continue to happen. The difference is in this case, usually the advertiser doesn't pay, so if the advertiser does have to pay, nobody gets paid.

GoPC, at any time you can come to my office in Tampa, I will have no problem downloading my reports for all of your traffic and show you everything. But just so you know we do get audited every year by Deloitte and Touche and they do look at 20 random accounts to make sure that not only were we paid correctly, but that we paid our customers correctly and we paid ourselves correctly. But as I said, anytime, you are more than welcome to stop by and I'll show you the information. Or if you are at one of the shows that we go to, I'll do the same there as well.

As far as getting you all of that information, I don't get it. You would laugh at the little bit of information we get back from the providers. If I send them 100 clicks and they only paid for 50, they only tell me they have 50. Did the other 50 not get to them? Were the fraud? But in most cases we can look on a domain level and see what was paid for and what wasn't. But still all I get back in most cases is domain, visitors, searches, clicks, revenue. Nothing else.

People ask me all of the time, could I get a list of the top paying keywords, unfortunately I really don't have such a thing. Because I don't know what is being paid until it's paid. Sure I could use the Google Adwords API or the YSM API, but both of them are worthless at the end of the day based on Smart Pricing/TQ Scores, what position/rank an ad is in, etc...

I explained to you why you only got 1 cent for 2 clicks, remember. But I'll explain it here again. We have an advertiser who pays us directly 1 cent a click no matter what country or keyword they are called a Run of Network Advertiser (RON), basically they usually get the crap traffic. I have no idea what your revshare is, but if you have 1 click we get a penny, and then take your revshare which for this example is 70%. Technically you should get $0.007, but we only pay to the penny, so basically we don't make anything on this click and pay you the full penny because we round it up. But if you have 2 clicks this adds up to $0.014 when we round it rounds down to 1 penny. Understand this is on a domain level, so if you have 1 click on 2 different domains with this advertiser you would actually get 2 cents.

I think you have been watching Office Space or Superman 3 a little too much. There is no skimming, we use normal rounding, if you want me to send you the mysql query, I will, it's actually pretty easy.

I think we have been a lot more transparent than any company that is out there. We tell people what their revshare is, go see if Google or a Google provider will tell you that.

Unfortunately, I actually have a date tonight with my wife who is waiting in the car for us to leave. So I will end here and check back later tonight.

Donny
 
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Let me clarify a few things. First, today, I am not a PPC company, today I am only a domain parking company. I get my ads from other providers, in some cases I am told on a domain level what somebody makes, in some cases I am told on an account level what somebody makes, and in other cases I am told what everybody makes as a whole. This is all I am provided.

Donny, first of all, thank you for Parked and all the hard work you do.
But I do have a question. What happens when you are "only told what everybody makes as a whole"? How do you distribute the funds to the account holders? How do you determine who made what?
 
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I'll toss my dimes worth in on this topic...

There are only a few major feeds, and of those, both Google and Yahoo view parked traffic as very low value; reducing what they pay the parking companies. And more to the point, view parking as competition to their own search engine ads - they'd prefer people never hit parked domains at all; wouldn't miss the parking business. For now the major feeds stay in the parking game because the revenue, while small compared to their search engine ads, is still a decent chunk of revenue; keep it out of the hands of the competition.

The long-term prospects for feed based parking services is bleak for two major reasons:

1. Reduced amounts being passed to the parking companies ... though some parking companies have stepped up efforts get advertisers directly bypassing the feeds, but is very challenging. The lack transparancy is far more of the fault of the feeds than the parking companies who, like us domainers, are at the mercy of the feeds.

2. Search engines, as well as ISPs, continue to find ways to prevent people from hitting parked domains to begin with - in my view, the biggest threat to the parking business. The most effective away around such tactics is, yep that dreaded word of many domainers, "development"...

For domains getting decent traffic already, custom content is the obvious answer to avoid people getting redirected away. But for domains with little to no traffic, there may be little future in parking - that will have a big effect on parking companies ... I expect in the near future, most all the major parking companies will go members only, tighten requirements for both new and current parking clients, and/or charge application fees - a few already do.

Rambling on, but anyways, IMHO, Donny is spot on with what he's saying. But for those not satisfied / questioning the earning drops, the simple answer is try out parking at some other places and compare the results for each domain and park them accordingly.

Ron
 
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fixed
 
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My account rep (Jennifer Marks) is useless. I have submitted an account conflict three times, and she still has not replied.

I don't see any open tickets to Jenn. Are you sending her emails directly?

Donny
 
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Everyone would love to have transparency, but transparency is not always possible or feasible. The best and straightforward way to ensure that you are getting the best rates for your traffic is to rotate them between different parking companies. Imo, even if domain parking services were to give you the entire excel spreadsheets of feed provider data to individual accounts, people would still have questions and doubts as to their legitimacy. I mean, the doubts would never cease to exist. Some people would then start doubting the feed provider's data accuracy and might even want the actual feed provider to give them another version of domain data on a daily basis. This could go on and on with no end result. To add to it, if domain parking services were to start providing such data on an account level, they would be inundated with queries, calls and would be spending more time answering questions than doing their business. While everyone wants fair reporting and revenue disbursals, transparency is not always an ideal or feasible scenario.

The best way is to either completely trust a company based on their past and existing performance, or try other companies and zoom in on the best performing company for your portfolio. Imo, most people in the end, after much experimentation, would rather retain their domains where they trust that their best interests are being cared for.

Another aspect is that no domain parking service would actually want to drive away their customers by paying them a pittance. (Unless ofcourse, it's a fly-by-night operator wanting to cash in and then make merry declaring bankruptcy or ending their customer relationships in a hurry quoting fraud clicks and the likes). So, I'm sure that Parked doesn't enjoy paying 1 cent clicks to anyone. I myself get quite a few 1 cent clicks, but I assume that these clicks originate from other countries where the advertisers might really be having restricted/smaller budgets and bid low. So it's a non issue for me. A simple example of this scenario is when I started with domains. I knew of just one company at that time.. Sedo. My domains at Sedo would make me pennies on most keywords. I mean pennies on even higher paid keywords. Eventually, when I realized that there were better parking services around, I moved my domains and realized the full potential of my domains. Similarly, every parking service realizes that low payouts would eventually mean loss of customers to other parking companies. Some don't bother about it, but some do. Imo, Parked bothers about it's customers and that's why you have Donny here everyday answering questions and tackling bottlenecks with speed. I have probably not even heard of any other parking service which pays its customers for downtime. Besides the downtime pay, look at how professional their entire team is. It's a well organized setup with timely reporting and clockwork payments. Has any other company even bothered to explain TQ scores etc to it's customers? Do we see any other parking service answering questions here on a daily basis for years? That in itself explains why Parked wouldn't want its customers to leave. They want you as much as you want them, unless ofcourse, someone is engaging in fraudulent activities.

I encounter problems at Parked too. Sometimes, I finalize at 30% less than estimated stats. When this happens, I try to first find the root cause with my domains rather than start casting doubts on whether I was paid fairly. This approach helps, because it makes you stronger with optimizing your domains and converting for the end advertiser. Maybe, your keywords are way off track and visitors clicking through are not actually interested in buying a product but just browsing. Maybe, you are sending too many non converting clicks to a particular advertiser. Maybe, you could pull off a keyword that is getting too many clicks for a week and then restore it later. There are just too many parameters to analyze, it's amazing. Sometimes I do question Donny about certain issues, but its to get an idea of what's going wrong with my domains rather than why am I being paid less. When I see my Q score drop, I ask Donny what am "I" doing wrong? This helps me correct my approach and do better in the coming days.

If you take care of your niche advertisers, they will take care of you. Just spend a few minutes looking at your landing page and take a look at your advertisers. Visit their sites (without clicking on your ads..lol) and see what they offer and what is their conversion expectation. Create your landing page not just to ensure a click through, but to ensure a conversion for the advertiser. I know there are limitations on how much you can customize your landing page, but we can still adhere to some best practices. For example, I see some domainers write 40% off widgets..in their domain title. Now... the domainer gets a clickthrough, but what about the end advertiser? Is he really selling his widgets at 40% less? A simple call to action is sometimes enough. Something on the lines of "find new solutions" "find new alternatives" "find proven dealers" etc. I mean, once we do our best to convert for the end advertiser, it's a job well done from our side. It's a click we've really earned. Remember, no advertiser is going to block a parked domain which converts well for him. For an advertiser it doesn't matter if you are a huge ecommerce portal or a huge branded website sending him traffic. All that matters to him is a conversion. So, if your parked domain gives him results, he'll love you for it and your domain will always pull in cash.

Enough said..
 
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Donny -

A possible case:

Deloitte and Touche are private auditors ,when they come you say ,this account was closed by click fraud , then they investigate if you pay the customer? you show them putting another paypal email which is not owned by the customer and money goes there and you say your customer "we credit back the revenue".Customers account was closed ,altough yahoo paid for it ,and customer get nothing.

I always have doubts on unpaid revenues at parked.com and others.
 
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well said Varon!...:)
 
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Teknosa - we provide them full access and they randomly choose different accounts to look at. Since you seem to know so much about being terminated, would you like me to have them investigate one of your terminated accounts?

Donny
 
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Teknosa - we provide them full access and they randomly choose different accounts to look at. Since you seem to know so much about being terminated, would you like me to have them investigate one of your terminated accounts?

Donny

:lol:
...
Maybe he's also in on the whole WWWNAMEPROS.COM scam that I'm victim of!

SDX
 
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Nice post, Varon. Makes a lot of sense.
 
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Donny - I will denounce some terminated accounts in the past with registered paypal emails on accounts.If you were not member of this auditors in the past ,they cant do something ,accounts must be within your membership date.I wonder if you really credit back to advertisers and in your tos it says "parked may ignore the payment".If you are ignore the payment what is this? I really know that yahoo pays you all the clicks which are finally written on the dashboard.I will inform the two auditors altough they are privately owned companies ,I hope they will not take bribe from you.If you request a screenshot from any parkig company about where does the money go , you can think negative thinks about that.
 
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Tony - WTF? A new avatar? :)

Teknosa - Believe what you want. But whenever an account is terminated by us or one of our upstream providers we let each other know of the situation and the advertisers are refunded.

texasgamer - When we get 1 number it's always fun. But let me give you a little history on this one. We first ran into this when we had Ask with a Google backfill feed, because that's all Google provides for anybody who has a AFS feed. So for example those Google parking companies that have and AFS feed they have this same situation today. But this is part of the reason that we have an estimation system today. We use our estimates not only for those providers that tell us domain level, but those that just tell us account level and those that just give us a single number. Initially it was not very easy to calculate, but over time we have gotten a system that is very accurate. We use a lot of historical information, what rank/position the ad that was clicked, the country, etc... I would say that it is within 2-3% when we are only provided a single number.

As far as Parked or WhyPark ever becoming a closed system like Fabulous is for example, I really don't see it happening unless we get to the point where there is just too much fraud. I would love to not have to deal with all of the fraud, it would be amazing how much more we could get done if we didn't have to deal with it. Maybe I should just offer a bounty on everybody who turns somebody in who is doing fraud.

I love transparency, I have a degree in Quantitative Business Analysis (Statistics). But I can only provide what I have or what I can create. And today we are pretty much providing everything we have. If there is something people are looking for that we don't have today, I'm all ears.

Donny
 
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Google had canceled his Adsense account without providing a reason. The judge ruled that it can’t cancel accounts for any reason at all, and awarded Greenspan $761.
Domain Name Wire » News » Publisher Who Sued Google Adsense Loses Appeal - The Domain Industry's News Source

When I read it I remebered Parked.com, When you send email to parked's partner support.They say "read the tos".They dont provide reason.If every terminated account holder ,take action like Greenspan ,parked.com can easily go bankrupt.
 
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But first judge said Google cant cancel an account for any reason at all,google sent it to higher rank court and in second court greenspan was absent.If he could go to court ,ofcourse he had won this issue.

General Legal view :

Ads provider cant cancel an account for any reason ,they can only chargeback the revenue if they prove there was a click fraud.Parking companies must behave this accounts like bank accounts,"bank accounts can never be closed" there is a banking law. This is just lack of laws about parking companies.Some argue that Publishers must be protected ,Parking companies are not allowed to not to pay if they cant show any proof.
 
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You need to read up on US law. The only reason Google lost the first time was that they sent an uninformed paralegal instead of a lawyer who understood Google's TOS, and they got a judge who had no idea how PPC or search engine marketing works either. It was corrected on appeal.

Look, if you think have a case, go hire a lawyer and pursue it. But stop wasting OUR time; you're not going to get anywhere in a forum.
 
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