Hi there,
This is my first post on NP. I was referred here by Faisj who said that quality of the forum and its members is higher here than anywhere else, so I thought I'd have a look. This seems to be the most sensible place to start.
My name is Ed Russell. I'm President of NameDrive (among other less glamourous things). We are still a small company (6 employees) but rapidly-growing since launch in September. We syndicate Google ads on our parked pages.
It seems there are a lot of happy people on here as far as revenue goes, but just to clear some things up:
- We display revenue exactly as it is given to us by Google (less our very small share). If your domain gets a $5 click, you see that in your account. Unfortunately, this has the downside that, as we don't ever subsidize clicks, you can get lower clicks in some cases.
- As we show real earning statistics, there is a 36-48 hour delay in revenue reporting from when the click was made to when we display the actual value. Until the clicks have been updated, we display a generic click value ($0.11 US, $0.10 Europe, $0.03 Asia etc). We have chosen these conservatively so that the earnings will hopefully always go
up after the update.
- We are constantly changing and aiming to improve. From launch in September to now, the system has changed so much that it is barely recognisable. This is the fastest-moving industry in the world and we want to reflect that.
- The fact is that no parking company is best for all domains for all people. Sadly. Even between companies such as DS, Sedo and ourselves who all have Google feeds, the results can vary wildly. The best strategy is to test, compare, move on. Leave your domains where they do best. That's how you make most money. Never tie yourself down to one program. We have seen results that go from extreme cases where we are forty times better than another PPC company! Though this is sadly not the norm and some people will naturally earn less but even people who are not 'fans' of us secretly leave some names which do better with us where they are!
- Sales. Parking with us doesn't mean you can't sell your domains with us. If you set your domain 'for sale' in your account, a link appears on your domain through which people can make an offer on your domain -
with no commission charged. Not only that, but you can even have a custom link that goes directly to your own sales page. Have a look at
www.boxedset.co.uk. The link goes to the owner's own sales page for that exact domain. Email or PM me if you'd like to set it up. Listing domains for sale on Sedo makes 100% sesne as it is the world's #1 domain market place - even I do. But parking them elsewhere doesn't necessarily lower your chances of selling as most offers come via your parked pages anyway. Always make sure you use an Escrow agent though, such as escrow.com or Sedo.
Some points from this thread:
True, we were 5 days late on our first two months' payments. Even Domain Sponsor have only been paying 'on time for 2 years'. What about their first year? Our next Payout date is next Thursday and we're on track to get everything done on time. A parking company's cash flow is not optimum - having to keep customers happy while waiting on payments from the Goog, but we've sorted out our early teething problems.
More traffic than other programs:
We only count uniques, but uniques are counted differently everywhere you go. Sedo is known for being to the conservative side of the middle, we are somewhere in the middle. We don't do SEO - no parking company is allowed to, but probably have the advantage of being smaller than Sedo and somewhat under Google's radar. The drop off in traffic probably has something to do with newly-parked names appearing higher up in Google and then dropping off.
We absolutely show uniques and not hits.
No thank you. Traffic should not be driven to parked sites. Parked sites should have inherent type-in or existing search engine traffic. We do not encourage our users to fabricate, drive or manipulate traffic in any way. If you have any questions about what is and what isn't allowed - though I think this is quite clear - feel free to PM or email me.
So, summing up. Much as I would love to, I cannot claim that we will earn you massive amounts more than any other parking company, but I can almost guarantee you that a percentage of your domains will do better with us than elsewhere, just as a percentage of your domains will most likely do worse with us than elsewhere. We can only hope that he first percentage is bigger than the second
You can contact me by email at
[email protected] or PM if you have any specific questions or comments.
I've tried to keep this informative rather than promotional as I don't like to blow our own trumpet. We're happy to let satisfied people do that for us
I'm sure there are also non-promotion rules and I've read over my post to check it's OK.
If you ever have any questions, you can always contact me directly. I have 5 or 6 forums to check up on, so if you post on here, I may take a while to get back, but I always will evenutally.
I look forward to hearing from you and working with you.
Ed
Sorry for the length of the post. Tried to sum up 3 months' energy in one post.
