May saw the emergence of even more new domain parking services.  In this issue we will feature Active Audience, the new service from the creators of Gold Key and the people behind BuyDomains.  Is the field getting too crowded?  Is Active Audience worth joining?

Active Audience is a new domain parking service from the creators of Gold Key.  This new service appears to target owners of larger portfolios and domain professionals with higher-traffic domains.  Gold Key and BuyDomains merged some time back to become YesDirect.  Active Audience appears to be built upon the experience of professionals who were involved in both projects. 

Active Audience offers the option of rotating parking pages which auto-optimize your revenue (similar in this respect to Domain Sponsor).  The standard landing pages are very professional, with targeted graphics and links.  One-click landers appear when Yahoo/Overture determines that your domain deserves them.  These pages are more stark, so that extra elements don't detract from someone clicking on links.

I've been testing Active Audience during May and I see some things I really like.  The graphics are crisper and many of the pages look more professional than Gold Key pages.  Gold Key style pages actually rotate along with these newer pages and more generic (but still attractive) text pages.  You have complete control over color schemes and graphic layouts (and whether layouts rotate to maximize cash).  Initial income appears to be on par with Gold key, but the service is really designed to improve your income over time.  It will probably take at least three months to really compare income with other services.

An interview with Brian Carr, Executive Producer for YesDirect (and Active Audience) follows at the end of this newsletter.

In other news,  Sedo has brought their Sedo Pro service out of beta, although the site still indicates that it is in beta in some places.   If you are a Sedo member ask them about this new service. As we've been reporting, the pro version of Sedo includes better stats and landing pages.   According to a 5/30 press release, the new service "provides parking professionals with improved statistical analysis tools, greater control over site optimization and page layout along with personalized attention from a dedicated account service representative."

SedoPro states "In order to maintain high standards of traffic quality, SedoPro asks each applicant to obtain an endorsement from an existing SedoPro member. Endorsement Codes can be obtained from any current SedoPro member. Admission to users who do not have an Endorsement Code is offered only to the very highest quality portfolio owners, following extensive checks by SedoPro staff. This can result in a delay in the processing of your application, and will make it more difficult to gain admission."

Send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it for an endorsement code for SedoPro.

Parking Dots continues to offer 80% of their Yahoo/Overture cut.  Other services pay closer to 50% - but other services may be getting a better cut from Overture to begin with. They are somewhat selective in who they will work with.  A faster site and new templates are still in the works.

Domain Sponsor had no big announcements, but they continue to work behind the scenes to monetize traffic.  They are going directly to advertisers as well as using feeds from other services.  NameDrive continues to provide fast setup and good stats.  It's still not clear how well their Park and Sell approach is working, and some people seeking to sell have reported that it was not as easy as they thought it would be.  Income still seems to be on par with Sedo.

Traffic Z has added new header graphics, including graphic depictions of major cities under the "Geography" category.  They had a stable month and the new server upgrades seem to have increased speed on their site and their parked pages.  They continue to offer some of the most flexible options for parked pages - including a free-form HTML area where you can include whatever links and elements that you desire.  Gold Key is still going strong despite the emergence of Active Audience.  Don't abandon them yet, but try a few domains at the new service too.

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Interview with Brian Carr, Executive Producer for YesDirect

I understand that Active Audience is based on your experiences with Goldkey.  How do these two services differ?

Actually the tools available in ActiveAudience.com are based largely on our experience managing the largest secondary portfolio in the market, the 665,000 domains we own through BuyDomains.com.

We optimize our own domains daily through various layouts, color schemes, image tests, usability tests and click-through analyses. ActiveAudience.com makes those tools and methods available to our domain parking clients. For example, we have 265 lander themes, as general as “airline tickets” and as specific as “teeth whitening,” and we add more every week.  

Another tactic that has a significant impact is treating our own domains similar to a financial portfolio, by optimizing the domain names by category, segment, and revenue analysis. So our hotel domains are parked in the travel category and hotel segment, and we know they monetize differently than an airfare domain in the travel segment.

That's why ActiveAudience.com features portfolio management tools for domain owners - they can create settings, designs, layouts and keywords for a few or for thousands of similar domains all at once. That’s not something available on Goldkey.com right now.

Why create a new domain parking service?  Why not just improve the existing Goldkey service?

As you can imagine, after the Goldkey.com acquisition in March our team had several ideas about reporting, portfolio management, and user interface changes that we wanted to introduce right away, based on the way we optimize our own domains internally. 

But the changes were systemic, not just a facelift, and engineering a complete overhaul right away could take Goldkey.com customers out of their comfort zone. So we started from scratch on fresh servers, using the best practices and backend code from the Goldkey.com system. You'll see the two interfaces are extremely different, and there are more customization options on ActiveAudience.com. But not everybody wants that, so we didn’t stray too far. We actually have the same Goldkey.com template available as an option on ActiveAudience.com. Goldkey.com users can even use their username and password on ActiveAudience.com if they want to move there, and their domains and account information will transfer with the push of a button. 

Goldkey.com is a thriving product that is extremely effective and easy to use, with a fast-growing customer base, and we're still upgrading it with best practices on our other products, such as ActiveAudience.com.

We see it as the best of both worlds, similar to Coca-Cola owning Sprite as well. Just different flavors based on what makes our customers the most comfortable.

Goldkey has had a reputation for keeping domains listed in search engines.  Will ActiveAudience rely on these same techniques?

We certainly try to cultivate the same type of innovative thinking. As you know, the rules for SEO change extremely fast.  For every change made to improve the rank of parked pages, search engines respond with smarter algorithms and ranking systems.

The heart of the issue is that users, and subsequently search engines, want dynamic and relevant content. The challenge for all domain parking services is to create pages that bring value to users and advertisers.  Our success does not end at a captured click but rather extends to whether or not what we offer makes the user want to return to a similar site or bookmark the parked page.  You see the change already in the designs we offer. 

Do these techniques work only if I use your nameservers?  What happens when I redirect domains in a frame?

Some techniques that target SEO do require changes to name servers.  However, the dynamic pages we offer can be implemented through URL redirect.

We want to provide real value not just the illusion of it and I hope this is one goal we have already met and exceeded. Providing the best experience for the end user and the advertiser is always a good guideline on the web but in our industry it is of paramount importance.

You mentioned that your experience with BuyDomains.com helped shape this new service.  What other lessons did you learn from BuyDomains that you are applying to the Active Audience service?

Our experience with BuyDomains.com has made us view the domain parking industry from the prospective of an asset management company. For example, the raging debate in the past year is whether pictures, images and layouts make much of a difference on the success of parked pages. What we found with our domain assets is each is different and has to be approached with that in mind.  

That’s why ActiveAudience.com offers optimization and testing for domain names. Simply put, with one click you test your traffic for each domain or group of domains on four different layouts, and we’ll notify you which layout produced the best click-through rates. After you know which layout works best, you can optimize even further with colors and themes and keywords. Or you can just leave it to us to continue testing and optimizing as we add new layouts. This is what we do on our own domains. 

That’s just one example of how we don’t view our job strictly as generating money for our customers today but also growing their assets for 2, 5 or 10 years down the line. 

What will happen to Goldkey now?  If someone is doing well with their domains on Goldkey why should they switch them to ActiveAudience? 

Goldkey.com will continue to thrive and be improved, so users may not want to switch at all. But if users really want to tinker with customizing their domains on their own, and work them into portfolios, ActiveAudience.com offers those options right now. We protected Goldkey.com usernames from being taken on ActiveAudience.com, so that means Goldkey.com users can login onto AcitveAudience.com with their existing Goldkey.com username and password. They’ll be asked to click a button if they want to move their parked domains and account information to ActiveAudience.com. If so, their Goldkey.com accounts will be deactivated, but any earned revenue will be moved over. Another option is to set up a new test account at ActiveAudience.com under a different name and e-mail address and try both services at the same time, it’s really their choice.

Despite recent lawsuits and settlements over "clickfraud," the pay-per-click advertising market still seems robust.  What thoughts do you have about trends in the industry?

It’s been clear for years now that the major players and decision-makers in our industry know the key to the PPC market is integrity with advertisers. It’s no surprise that the PPC market is thriving, because it is particularly adept at tracking conversion rates for advertisers and giving them even more data to make prudent financial decisions. Compare that to other advertising options, where advertisers have much less visibility into conversion. For example, there is the ongoing scandal in which advertisers were told inflated circulation figures at various national newspapers and magazines, and it only came to light when a whistleblower went public. And television advertisers still don’t know how often people click to another channel when their commercials come on -- even though they are paying potentially inflated advertising rates based on those eyeballs.

What we have seen in the last several years as domain parking companies have burst onto the online landscape has been the birth of Direct Search. To this point we have converted the traffic in a very simple but profitable PPC model following the lead of search engine advertising.  But we have just scratched the surface when it comes to changing domains from billboards to dynamic storefronts.   

For example, an exciting element is CPA [cost per acquisition], which produces even more targeted customers for advertisers, who only pay when the leads are qualified. We are aggressively testing CPA partners on our own portfolio, and as we optimize for the best profitable mix between CPA and CPC on various categories, we will deploy them on our parking services. And that’s an important point: Unlike some major domain parking services, we don’t test ideas on our client’s domain names and see how the results turn out, because that could do harm.