Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Who said domain parking is dead?

As I posted earlier this month, Sedo moved to a new, ajax-based ad delivery system.

Apparently, this has now met the approval of Google, the main advertising feed for Sedo; the end result is higher payouts.

Much higher PPC is now achieved at Sedo, bringing my November totals to 2007 levels, before the so-called collapse of the economy.

Fantastic.

After moving the remainder of my portfolio from Yahoo-driven Parked.com I witnessed a sizable increase in parking revenue as well.

Sedo cleaned out the bot/spam traffic junk and while less visits might be recorded, both PPC and total revenue more than make up for the loss in visitor numbers.

And that’s exactly what counts: the money that goes into our pockets from the performance of no-cost parking.

One of the most important tasks of a developer is to deliver quality work. To do so, they must use their expert knowledge and deliver results through the use of their acquired skills.

And that’s where the problem might lie.

Some clients share a different opinion about what constitutes effective or appealing development. They might be opposing e.g. to your choice of font size or the number of colors in the design.

They can be a pain in the royal ass, when you know you’re doing the best for them.

The truth is, there are several ways to work with such clients. The most obvious one: do all the changes they want, then present “before” and “after” mockups which would allow them to see the light of truth.

Another approach would be to “argue” effectively, listing the reasoning behind your choices and present them along industry standards or next to similar choices made by the competition.

Your goal as a developer is not to simply please the customer but also to create something that works well and looks good. The ability to circumvent the hard rocks that the client might place in your path will come with time; it’s yet another experience point to be picked along the way.

Let me start by stating the Parked.com guys are stellar and that their platform, including the customizable templates are superb.

It’s just that their advertising channels suck right now and I’m not willing to stick it out until the situation improves.

It all started with the notorious rating that Yahoo imposed, which they then expanded to categorize domains – and often block them from Yahoo.

Yahoo actively tags domains in the following categories:

Banned

Trademark

Quality Block (all TLDs that are not com/net/org)

Controversial

Restricted

Adult

Alcohol

I have to point out that the 4-5 banned domains that Yahoo inexplicably tagged as such, Parked wasn’t able to have them reinstated; the same domains exist in Google without any problems whatsoever. As for the so-called trademarks, both my Parthenon.info and Topolowa.com are geo-domains. The “Controversial” rating was earned by domains such as ViolentSports.com and ClonedMan.com which effectively displays the type of censorship and pseudo-ethics that define Yahoo’s policies.

So the bottom line is that Yahoo’s policies are what they are – in my opinion, fascistic and outright ridiculous; if Tavern.org is an “alcohol” domain that receives lower PPC from Yahoo then I’d rather keep it at Sedo until the Yahoo masterminds stop drinking cool-aid.

Very rarely do I engage in negotiations that take a long time to complete.

Whenever a third party escrow is involved, I’m depending on the buyer’s speed to complete the necessary steps; all while mine are as fast as my Internet connection.

Very fast, that is.

This is a first for me though, having agreed on a sizable sale in a couple of days, only to witness it stall 45 days later at Escrow.com

Despite the buyer’s promises that payment is in due order, I had to cancel the Escrow.com transaction with a note that the wire never arrived. Escrow shared my frustration over this; despite their very low fees they have a reputation to live up to, after all.

Throughout this ordeal I kept in touch with the buyer over the phone. Upon my cancellation of the Escrow he too seemed to be disappointed; the funding he was expecting hadn’t yet hatched. He asked to make a security deposit to ‘lock’ the domain – that was already “reserved” for him for the 45 days prior.

I declined, stating that other offers were on the table. I wasn’t making this up; when I price domains into the five figures I am very confident about their worth.

The buyer came back the next day; surprisingly, his funding “egg” had hatched miraculously overnight. I have a few theories about what happened during those 24 hours but I can’t share them right now.

The bottom line is that the new Escrow.com process completed in 4 days. After 45 days of “bullshit” excuses about how a hedge fund manager dragged his feet or how an LLC was about to be formed, the buyer did what he was supposed to do in the first place: honor the agreement in a manner consistent with the rules of engagement.

As I’m having a “Blue Moon” beer and some Papa Johns pizza, I wonder how many would have given up after the first week or two. Forty-five days is a long time to sit on a live transaction without flinching in some way but the end result proves that it was all worth it.

In recent weeks, both Sedo and Parked have updated key parts of their advertising feeds, to ensure higher quality traffic and cut down on the junk or bot traffic.

The preliminary results show that such a move was much needed. In the case of Parked, the Yahoo feeds are being dropped with Bing’s advertising network taking over; the end result is considerably higher PPC for quality keywords.

Sedo on the other hand took drastic measures both with the technology behind the displaying of ads; it seems that ajax is utilized in order to accurately provide relative ads, filter out bot traffic and achieve better CTR or conversion rates.

Since the changes occurred at Sedo on November 1st, I’ve witnessed the following:

Most domains lost roughly 20% to 30% of their counted traffic. This is due to bot traffic not being included anymore.

Clickthrough rates more than doubled across the board; this is to be expected, as the new technology delivers faster and more related ads and there are more clicks relative to the number of impressions.

The most impressive part: revenue jumped between 200% to 400% without any keyword changes or reallocation of categories! This by far the best result that everyone hoped for.

In a nutshell: parking domains is far from over, as technology evolves and the economy improves there will be further increases in the advertising budgets and resulting ad revenue. As I wrote yesterday, development is not suited for everyone and domain parking is a strong sector of domain monetization.