Domain News

Google announced today that they have extended their Adsense for Domains to all publishers. Although, the program is being opened to all publishers, Google will continue to monitor compliance. The Adsense Blog states that the program will be rolled out to North American English-speaking markets first and then expanded into additional markets and languages in the future.

One interesting point that is made by Google in this post is that advertisers are asking for their ads to appear in this AFD program and they feel that the traffic from domains converts well. From the blog :

Advertisers also have additional opportunities to find their customers, and ads on these pages convert well. In addition, we regularly receive requests from advertisers who have found domains to be an effective way to reach their users.

[Thanks to Bill Hartzer for bringing this to our attention]

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Original post by Adam Strong

With all that’s happened with Yahoo! recently, this may come as no surprise, but Jerry Yang has stepped down as CEO. Yang, who co-founded the company in 1995, has come under a great deal of criticism in recent months, most notably for turning down Microsoft’s $47.5 Billion dollar buy-out proposal (almost 3x what the company is now worth).

Yahoo remains in a very vulnerable position as their market cap plummets , the Google-proposed ad partnership has reportedly disappeared . There have also been no new developments coming from the rumored AOL deal and Yang’s departure could signal the end of that possibility.  Yang’s decision is better late than never, but in this economy it will take a lot of work to get the company back where it was just months earlier.  With the close connection domainers have to Yahoo, this is important news. Hopefully this move is a sign that the company is making a turn around.

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Original post by Adam Strong

Domainers Reporting Bigger Squeeze on Google Feeds

Domainers have been talking about the declines in PPC revenues for quite awhile now, but more recently we have been receiving consistent reports of recent declines in Google-fed PPC programs. At the same time we are hearing this report, we’ve heard rumblings of Google exercising clawbacks on revenue.

Some chatter started at DomainState today about the issue of Google ‘clawbacks’, ie. Google taking money back for domain name revenue found to be fraudulent. The ‘clawing-back’ refers to Google taking back money that was previously paid out on these domains for a given time period. The PPC clawback topic was also mentioned in recent promotions from NameDrive.

it seems that others are trying to spoil the fun. Some parking companies are withholding earnings from their clients and even asking for money to be returned to them – so-called ‘Clawbacks’.

As economic problems lead to cutbacks in ad spending and thus cuts in revenue for Google, they, like many companies, will be focusing on tightening things up. It is likely under these conditions of declining revenue that Google is taking a much closer look at the domain channel and where the traffic is coming from and adjusting payouts accordingly. It surely doesn’t help that Google’s role in monetizing trademark domain names is also under the microscope now.  From DNN sources, Google contracts reportedly allow for a ‘clawback’ on previously earned revenue up to 60 days.  It makes sense that Google would be looking in to this closer now.

We expect more belt-tightening in the months to come and for poor performing domains as well as junk and fraudulant domain traffic to be scrutinized much closer. Stay tuned.

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

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Original post by Adam Strong

For many domainers, the launch of ParkingPanel.com in the fall of ‘06 was a welcome addition to the PPC space. The Oklahoma-based company saw a quick growth spurt with some large domain portfolio owners switching over to their system. Then in February ‘08 the plug was pulled on the Google feed syndication through Ask.com. Revenues reportedly bottomed out and signs of life from ParkingPanel were few and far between. Well, ParkingPanel is still alive and back with a new Google feed and reportedly they’re rolling out some new features as well.

A day ago I caught a snippet on ParkingPanel’s Roy Barrets Facebook page that piqued my interest. His profile read “Roy Barrett is ecstatic about the new ParkingPanel.com ad feed provider!”.

Here’s 3 features from the new features being announced that I found interesting :

New feed - Roy couldn’t tell me who (per contractual obligations) but it isn’t hard to figure out from domains on their DNS such as Planets.com or AT.com that they are using a Google feed. (I’m not good at figuring out which one. . . maybe someone can point that out to me in the comments.)

New Templates - They’re releasing new templates because of the new provider requirements (some of the old ones can be seen here). More notably they’re rolling out additional adult templates (check out pornfest.org for a sample)

1-Click Landers - Although it’s only well-suited for some domains, 1-click is always in high demand . This is a welcome addition for maximizing earnings

The news going out today from ParkingPanel can be seen after the jump :

ParkingPanel.com is proud to announce several long-awaited changes in our premium domain parking platform.

New Primary Feed Provider! New Autopilot System!
New Payment Processor! New Premium and Adult Templates!
1-click and 2-click Landing Pages! New MassPay Functionality!

Background

As you may know, ParkingPanel.com (and many others) lost our premium advertising feed in March of this year as part of contract negotiation between our ad network providers. Since this time, we’ve used a temporary solution that did not offer the global coverage or high relevance of the original provider. As a result of this, overall performance dropped significantly and did not effectively compete in the global marketplace of first-tier domain parking solutions. Many premium ParkingPanel.com clients moved domains to competing providers to further enforce global coverage.

New Primary Feed Provider

ParkingPanel.com is now proud to announce the inclusion of a new primary first-tier advertising feed provider. As many of our clients can attest, we have extensive experience in optimizing premium search feeds, and our entire team is very excited about the performance from our new advertising feed provider.

New Autopilot System

Since inception, ParkingPanel.com has been a pioneer in its launch of self-correcting, self-optimizing direct navigation services. With the new launch of ParkingPanel.com we have built improved internal processes to yield more revenue for your domains. Our system intelligently chooses the best ad provider, however we’ve now have gained much more insight through improved technology and advertising experience to help you yield more revenue from parked domain names. Our new Autopilot 2.0 technology is dramatically more improved than the original, and can track performance exponentially better than Autopilot 1.0.

New Templates / New Adult Templates

We are launching over a dozen new templates with the refresh of ParkingPanel.com. These templates will be filtered into our system after testing in the coming days and you will have access to these new templates. Our pro templates have ChromaAnalysis technology and you will be able to choose colors that match your domains, and all of our published features will be allowed in these templates. In addition, we will be launching several new adult templates to help your adult names achieve higher CTR and yields with the new launch.

1-click and 2-click Landing Pages

We now have 1-click landing pages on ParkingPanel.com. Depending on performance, ParkingPanel.com will decide whether 1-click or 2-click landers will do better with your domain. This decision is made depending on your traffic volume, relevance to ad inventories available, and a host of other processes we do best. As always, you can override our Autopilot system and choose your own landers.

New Payment Processing / MassPay Functionality

We had some initial quirks with our original ParkingPanel.com payment systems in regards to rollover earnings getting paid with monthly earnings. We have chosen a new platform for payment processing that includes major performance increases and will not charge you for PayPal payments received.

Come visit us!

The ParkingPanel.com team will be in New York for the TRAFFIC conference in Brooklyn September 23-26, 2008. All of our account managers will be on hand to answer any questions about the transition to our new provider. We are completely confident these changes will propel ParkingPanel.com to be the provider of choice for premium domain holders who choose to yield the best revenue from domain names.

Best Regards,

The ParkingPanel.com Team

————————————

New ParkingPanel.com FAQ

Which domains work best on ParkingPanel.com?

The new ParkingPanel.com works great with all traffic. We have 1-click and 2-click landers, and depending on performance, ParkingPanel.com’s autopilot system will choose the best solution for your domain name. The very best performance comes from targeted vertical niches with very high traffic. If you have high traffic names, please contact your account manager with a list of high-traffic names to pre-optimize for best results on our system. Although our system is automated and will optimize names, our account managers have extensive training in ad network research and will do their best to pre-optimize names based on existing data we have from similar parked domains.

Where are my old templates?

Because of our primary feed provider change, we’ve had to make several changes to templates and launch completely new templates. For a sneak peek of templates to come, we have included some screenshots of templates that will be added in the coming days. Our autopilot system will choose the best templates for you, or you can pick and choose your own.

Do adult names still do well with you?

Yes, we do have good global coverage for adult traffic. We are launching several new adult templates and hope to do well with your adult traffic.

Will international traffic work well with ParkingPanel.com?

International traffic will now be restored as well as full language support. We now have the some of the best international coverage of domain parking companies and we’re among the highest in our revenue share with all of our upstream providers.

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Original post by Adam Strong

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As per requirements of their main PPC provider Google, Sedo will now include unpaid search results on Domain Landers. From the Sedo announcement as posted on their site:

One of these industry-wide changes is the implementation of organic search results on parked domains. Organic searches will appear at the end of a search results page that is generated when visitors click on a related link or enter a search term. These unpaid links should improve the user experience and the relevancy of the content. Another change required of our advertising partner, is that visitor clicks on your parked domains will now open the target page in the same window.

Both of these changes will be rolled out globally and users may see variations in CTR. However, with the new Auto Layout Rotation tool improving CTR at 11% on average, this should counteract any negative effects. We are also working on several new parking features which will be rolled out in the coming months to improve your parking experience with Sedo.

Fabulous.com, also using a Google PPC feed, already had to make similar changes to their parked pages earlier.

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls

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Original post by Frank Michlick

Marchex (MCHX), a company already known for its leading local search/advertising network as well as their domain portfolio, has combined Industry Brains and Enhance Interactive to create Marchex Adhere, a new pay-per-click channel that will provide advertisers and agencies with exclusive access to more than 200 premium publishers.

Marchex Adhere is primed to compete with Google and Yahoo over domain name advertising feeds, allowing advertisers with any budget to reach a highly-qualified audience.

According to the press release, it “enables national advertisers to efficiently fulfill their online budget in the same manner as they purchase offline advertising namely national, spot and local in a single media buy.” It also “provides small- and medium-sized businesses the opportunity to reach local customers directly through Marchex’s OpenList and reach national customers through premium, vertically focused publishers.”

Marchex has already struck deals with major distribution partners including BusinessWeek, PC World, The Motley Fool, RealtyTrac.com, CNET, MorningStar.com, Kiplinger.com, BankRate, and more. If you want to find out more about this exciting advertising platform, you should check out the Marchex Adhere video.

Further Reading:

• Marchex Adhere Press Release
• LocalPoint: A Marchex Milestone
• The Domains: Marchex Launches New Pay Per Click Advertising Channel: Adhere
• Domain Name Wire: Can Marchex Pull It Off?

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

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Original post by Chad Kettner

Domain name parking company Skezno announced via an email to partners today that they have received a minority stake investment from the Ashmore Group. The company release which has been copied below had not made it to either businesses website at the time of this writing.

Skenzo, a leading provider of technology, in the traffic monetization business, today announced the completion of a significant minority investment from the Ashmore Group. The Ashmore Group is one of the world’s leading Investment Firms managing funds over US$36.5 billion.

(more…)

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ashmore group, Divyank Turakhia, private equity, skenzo

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Original post by Adam Strong

Forgive me for missing out on the obvious additional misuse of another racist domain name, Niggers.com which is owned by the “Anti Hate Association” and currently is displaying a parking page by Sedo. Is the Anti Hate Association aware of how their domain is being used? (more…)

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Original post by Adam Strong

As per an email we just received from Parked.com, Yahoo! has warned the parking companies using a Yahoo! feed that they need to enforce the anti-arbitrage (”no paid traffic”) rules in the future.

Parked.com had been the only parking company we were aware of that was able to allow small targeted amounts of arbitraged traffic.

The email references the parked.com terms of service:

“All other types of traffic including bought traffic, traffic driven by PPC campaigns, traffic directed from hyperlinks are not permitted. If your traffic originates from any sources other than type-in and search engine traffic, you will not be entitled to payment as per this Agreement. Regular checks are carried out and we reserve the right to suspend any domain from our Service at any time, on our sole discretion, if we reasonably believe that you have violated this Agreement; for example, if we suspect that the traffic on your domain is bought, generated or redirected in any way that contravenes these terms and conditions.”

The email goes on to say:

Accordingly, all arbitrage must stop effective 1pm PST on Thursday, February 14, 2008. Even though arbitrage will no longer be allowed, all accounts will still be paid.

With more and more feed providers being very strict about the quality of traffic, it appears that re-registered expired domains might be a future target of similar changes. Most of the parking companies’ agreements state that traffic that originates from hyperlinks is not acceptable either.

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

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arbitrage, parked.com, yahoo

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Original post by Frank Michlick

According to an article by DomainNameWire, Ask.com is to stop syndicating the google advertising feed to parking providers.

Domain Name Wire has learned through multiple sources that Ask.com’s Google feed will no longer be syndicated to parking companies as of March 1. A number of parking companies use this feed to augment other search results. I know that Parked.com uses it for traffic to some foreign companies, and apparently HitFarm and Skenzo use this feed as well.

Ask.com had also recently dropped a large part of their domain parking deals.

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

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ask.com, domain name wire, domain parking, google

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Original post by Frank Michlick

Moniker announced today that all of their Domain Parking customers in the TrafficClub program are to be moved to DomainSponsor.

From the announcement email: Due to other opportunities and future enhancements to our domain monetization strategy, we have decided to fully migrate all TrafficClub services to DomainSponsor effective January 31. On that day, we will convert customer accounts automatically to DomainSponsor.

[via The Domains]

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

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domainsponsor, moniker, oversee.net, PPC industry, trafficclub

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Original post by Frank Michlick

After the recent purchase of Moniker by Oversee.net, Skenzo has now announced that they will no longer be offering their monetization to customer’s of Moniker’s TrafficClub domain parking platform. They posted the following note on their website:

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