April saw a slowdown in domain income on most Services.  A lot of people switched services to try their luck elsewhere, but not too many people reported luck elsewhere.   As May begins Parking Dots announces unprecedented 80% payouts.  Also in this issue - Matt Bentley of Sedo  provides his take on industry changes.

Things are a little slow right now, in the lull between the Domain Roundtable conference and the TRAFFIC conference in Las Vegas.  Changes are afoot in the domain industry, and some of the changes at Sedo and Parking Dots are highlighted in this issue.

Parking Dots  was an exception to the April slowdown based on the numbers that I reviewed.  Based on that, it's possible that Google-based services were hit harder than Overture-based services.  Much of this is likely a seasonal fluctuation, and pay-per-click services may recover in May and June.  I also noticed a slight turndown in AdSense payouts for developed domains.

Parking Dots  also unveiled new landing pages.  Examples can be seen at

• easy-hits.com
• fnbm.com
• seasoncare.com

They recently announced that they now pay out a whopping 80% of what Overture pays them.  Other services are estimated to pay only 50% or so.  They report that their new system is much quicker to set up accounts and domains.  Intersearch Group/Walnut Ventures - the company behind Parking Dots - is actively looking to purchase high quality domain portfolios.  They also announced a new leasing program.  According to Andrew Keery at Parking Dots:

"As a leading domainer ourselves, we're always on the lookout for domains to add to our portfolio.  For domainers that have one or more of the premium domains that we are looking for, but are not ready to sell, we offer domain leasing.  We'll pay 100% of our Overture revenue share in exchange for an option to buy.  If a higher bidder comes along, all we ask is a chance to match their price.  We can apply this program to a single domain or a whole portfolio."

TrafficZ  experienced some problems with their reporting interface for a day or two as they continue to upgrade to improve capacity.  Domains hosted with them continued to function the whole time, and they continue to look great!   They now report today's estimated stats in orange, and they replace these numbers with the actual numbers when they get the official domain report from Overture. You may see your numbers increase or decrease when this change occurs.

Sedo  is preparing to bring their Sedo Pro service out of beta soon.  (Matt Bentley provides more information on this in an interview
later in this issue.) They also added yet another landing template - this one is called "simple" and can be seen (at least for now) at: 

• westvirginiarivers.com

An interview with Sedo's Matt Bentley takes up the second half of this issue.

Domain Sponsor  has finally adopted new templates for many of their sites.  The templates rotate randomly at first - while stats determine which template works best for each domain.  One of the new ones is especially ugly (in my opinion) while another has nice graphics themed for the site.  I can't really provide examples here, since they rotate - but this system can be seen on domains such as

• drugflush.com

(just hit refresh a few times to see all three designs)

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.

Gold Key is in a holding pattern since being acquired by the parent company of BuyDomains.  They are still recommended.

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Interview with Matt Bentley of Sedo

Many domain owners in the U.S. are familiar with Matt Bentley of Sedo.  Matt was CEO of Sedo's U.S. operation for the past two years, and is now heading to Germany as Chief Strategy Officer. 

I know that there has been some shifting of positions at Sedo in the last year.  What is your current title and why the changes?

In April I was named Chief Strategy Officer for Sedo's parent company Sedo GmbH in Cologne, Germany. Although the US has been and will continue to be our most important market, relocating back to headquarters will allow me to apply all of the market knowledge accumulated during two years as CEO of Sedo's US subsidiary to improving product and strategy for the entire company.

SedoPro is the first result of this effort-- it was born specifically to address the ultra-competitive US parking market, where there are many large domain portfolio holders who need more sophisticated portfolio analysis tools, higher payouts, and greater control over the look and functionality of their domains.

At the same time, we're bringing in a very experienced manager in the form of Tim Schumacher, one of Sedo's co-founders, to take over the role of CEO of the US subsidiary company and help ensure its continued growth in the coming years.

Sedo has been known for its variety of services and for its relatively generic parking pages.  At one point Sedo even claimed that their research showed that the generic pages worked better.  With your launch of SedoPro you seem to be joining those services that provide more graphically interesting pages that look more like "real websites."  Why the change?

Our research continues to show that the best way to increase monetization is to improve the targeting and relevancy of the links and advertisements displayed on the page. In other words, all of the pretty pictures in the world aren't going to help if your landing page doesn't help the visitor find what he's looking for. In fact, in many cases news feeds, multiple photos, and other content slow down load times, distract the users, and reduce CTRs, with disastrous consequences for a domain's earnings.

I personally don't believe that the goal of domain parking companies should be to trick visitors into thinking that they've landed at a destination website. Direct navigation is an active surfing behavior, and-- along with search-- the only source of primary traffic on the Internet. Fortunately for domain owners, the past 5 years have seen advertisers paying an ever-increasing premium to channel this pool of active surfers to their websites, since studies have shown that they're more likely to be in buying mode than passive surfers (such as those reading news on a content site).

Thus, where we can really add value is by ensuring that parking pages are truly useful for helping users find what they're looking for-- eg, Sedo is exploiting best practices from the advertising world such as behavioral targeting and contextual targeting to serve relevant links, using visitors' location to serve up pages in their own language and with locally-targeted ads, and exploring supplements to PPC ads for those instances where text ads alone don't deliver what the user is looking for. The end result is that visitors say "hey, that page was really useful" and then continue to use the page as a resource for locating sites in that topic area: that's direct navigation at its best!

That said, I do think there's a solid argument for presenting the user with an attractive, professional-looking parking page. Sedo currently offers 5 well-proven layouts, with another half-dozen or so in various stages of testing and refinement. Using multiple layouts helps avoid "layout fatigue"-- plus we find that certain domains do better with certain layouts-- for example, adult traffic has performed very well on our "Phoenix Pink" layout, travel does well on "Phoenix Blue" and financial/ legal services traffic does particularly well on the "Lite" layout.


Tell us what else we can expect from SedoPro when it launches.

If you're a professional Domain Investor, the income you generate from your portfolio is your livelihood, and you need the tools and control to maximize your income. A basic earnings report doesn't allow you to do the analysis you need, and simple keyword or photo selection won't help you squeeze out every last dollar in RPM.

To overcome the limitations of existing parking services we've spent the past six months extensively testing an entirely new parking service with a select group of high-end domainers as beta testers. The Pros told us they wanted better looking page designs, so we tested layout after layout to find which ones would perform the best (currently 5 designs are public, and a half dozen more are in testing). The Pros told us they wanted better portfolio analysis tools, so we added tools to identify trends, find out where visitors are coming from, and quickly select the best paying advertising keywords. Armed with a much improved understanding of their domain traffic, the testers wanted more control over their landing pages, so we added PageElements to help them individually configure each element of the parking page to maximize revenue. You can even enter custom Related Links and set a different keyword for each of your visitor language groupings.

The initial feedback has been very good, but we're not going to stop just yet! Some of the next features in the pipeline are the most exciting: soon PageElements will be able to automatically configure your pages for maximum earnings. Should you go with search box, or without? Pink layout, or blue? PageElements knows the answer, and by automatically choosing the best configuration for every single domain whether you have 200 or 200,000, it will maximize your overall earnings while saving you time.

For those who prefer manual control, we're also going to be adding additional customization options. Currently you can select your page layout, PageElements, main keyword, language-specific keywords, related links, category links, and photo. Soon you'll also be able to set custom meta-tags, add your own title, description, and links; even choose additional monetization options like pop-unders, banners, or PPL (Sedo's parent company is Europe's largest online advertising company, so we have access to a lot of advertiser relationships that others do not).

Last but not least, the other major change is greatly increased earnings-- obviously our Pro users receive higher revenue shares, but in addition to that there are a number of back-end refinements in our targeting technology that will help SedoPro continue to push our RPMs higher than the competition.


NameDrive has recently captured a big chunk of the domain parking market with their "Park and Sell" approach.  I understand that founder Greg Manriquez formerly worked at Sedo.  How does your approach to buying and selling domains differ from NameDrive's approach?  Why do you think that they are suddenly so popular?

Sedo has been combining parking and selling since 2002, and we're a firm believer that only by maximizing their returns from selling and parking can Domain Investors get the full value out of their domain names. Obviously seamless integration with the world's largest and most active domain marketplace is a major draw for a lot of our parkers. A few bucks every day in parking earnings is nice, but if you can then turn around and sell that domain for $100,000, you're talking about earnings on an entirely different scale.

I'm not sure why a domain owner would prefer to have their domains marketed to a small group of domain investors at multiples of a few years earnings rather than to end-user buyers who generally pay multiples of 50-100 years or higher. Unless you're looking to quickly exit the business, we've seen year after year that the best approach to selling domains is to attract end-user buyers and offer them a secure and professional way to make an offer through a credible third-party marketplace. Thanks to eBay, everyone is familiar with the concept of buying through an online marketplace, but very few end-user buyers are comfortable with the idea of directly negotiating with a domain owner.

Clearly the concept works: last year Sedo was responsible for 65% of the high value ($5K and up) domain sales reported on DNJournal, more than twice as much as our nearest competitor!

By the way, if you are interested in liquidating your portfolio and exiting the industry, drop us a note-- our buyers will pay 10x!


One complaint that people have about Sedo (and about Afternic, for that matter) is that domain sales and purchases sometimes take a long time.  Why is that?

Securely transferring a domain name can be a complicated process, especially when you're involving multiple registrars and/ or different countries. Other services, like Escow.com, simply collect the payment and say "please send the goods"-- it's not domain-specific at all. In contrast Sedo is actually assisting you with the transfer of domain ownership from the seller to the buyer, sometimes mediating between five different parties-- buyer, seller, each of their registrars, and the registry. In some cases we'll even move the domain to a Sedo registrar account so that we can pay the seller immediately while helping the buyer wrangle with the registrar transfer. Add in additional factors like international bank transfers, registries with cumbersome procedures (such as Nominet requiring signed original copies of .co.uk transfer forms), and a transfer can sometimes take some time to complete.

But on the positive side we've often heard from domain sellers and especially buyers who are extremely thankful for Sedo's personal assistance during the transfer process. Our Transfer Consultants know the nuances of registry and registrar transfer regulations in and out-- and in many cases have personal contacts to speed things along-- so their assistance can be especially invaluable if you're trying to change ownership on an exotic TLD like .md or .ws, or get a sketchy registrar to cooperate.


What trends to you see in the domain parking industry?  Are there any things on the horizon that worry you?

There seem to be two general camps in page design: those moving towards increasingly useful pages and those moving towards content-rich pages. The former offer better monetization by making it more likely that a visitor will click on an advertising link, and help to reinforce direct navigation behavior-- if you find something useful when you type in a domain, you're more likely to do it again. The content camp hopes to attract repeat visitors and give domain owners an actual website they can be proud of. Both approaches are a dramatic step forward from the relatively bland and homogenous pages common today, and although I personally tip towards useful pages, you can expect Sedo to offer page designs and customization options to appeal to both camps.

For a few years now I've been saying that the days of typo and TM domains are numbered, and today more than ever I feel that this is a defining trend. If you're currently generating much of your revenue from typos and/or TM domains, consider selling those domains and re-investing in high-quality generic domain names. While traffic to typos may never go away, advertisers simply don't want to see their ads on these types of domains-- and they will increasingly pay a premium to be featured on generic category-owning domains like makeovers.com, gamer.com, or DesignerClothes.com. Thus, values of these domains will continue to skyrocket far beyond the 10x mark, while typo domains will languish at much lower multiples.

As an industry we still have a lot of work to do educating online advertisers about the value of domain name traffic. Our research has shown that domain parking traffic converts as well as -- and in some cases, much better than -- traffic