  | |
| GoldKey Rejuvinated, ParkingSite Bites the Dust
| | |
GoldKey has launched their new, renovated site as of February 1, 2007. According to NameMedia, this site incorporates many of the tools that have been available only to ActiveAudience members. ActiveAudience focuses on larger domain holders, and not everyone is accepted. GoldKey can work well for large domain holders, but the service are also available to domainers who own less than 50 domains. The new site promises more flexibility and new, fresh landers. The staff at NameMedia assure me that they continue to focus on SEO as well. In the past domains were less likely to lose pagerank and search engine placement when parked with GoldKey, and hopefully this will continue. Features of the new GoldKey include:
- 6 custom templates
- Over 300 themes and color schemes
- Advanced reporting and statistics
- Advanced optimization tools
- Ability to organize domains by portfolio
GoldKey is highly recommended.
I recently removed ParkingSite from my page of parking reviews at ParkQuick.com. The site itself is now a parking page. I don't believe I ever received a payment from them, but I only tried a few domains there. This is one of those ventures that seemed like a good idea at the time, but never got enough technical support or financial backing to make it work. Huseyin and his staff at DNForum are stretched pretty thin with everything they do to keep that site running. Adding a full-blown parking service was probably just a little too much. If you have domains at ParkingSite you should move them immediately.
back to top
| | | |
|
| | News from the Parking Services
I've Backed off of DomainSponsor for now. I dropped their "highly recommended" status on 1/18 (before they announced their revenue adjustments). If you have thousands of traffic domains, then you'll probably have a good experience there. You may want to stick with them. Otherwise, try one of the recommended services. ParkingDots seems to have their worst stats problems ironed-out - so I returned that service to "highly recommended" status on 1/18. Move some of your DomainSponsor domains to ParkingDots (or  Sedo, GoldKey, or ActiveAudience) for a more rewarding experience.
A few days after we changed our recommendations DomainSponsor announced a new policy on "Revenue Adjustments", stating that "consolidated Revenue Adjustments will be occurring on a regular basis to applicable accounts, targeted on the 15th and last business day of each month. A Revenue Adjustment may result from events such as a credit due for system performance, a deduction made on artificial traffic patterns, etc. and will appear in your account statistics". DomainSponsor is breaking new ground with their DomainFEST shows - holding a T.R.A.F.F.I.C.-style conference at a reasonable price. Their new landing page system also shows promise. It's the money. They are no longer highly recommended because of below-average performance.
Traffic Valet announced recently that they are separating their adult domains from their non-adult domains. "Because of upcoming changes in Google for Domains feed system aimed to separate adult domains from other (non-adult) domains we need you to pay attention to a new field in your domain management interface called "Adult"." This field identifies domains of an adult related nature which would receive only adult related sponsored ads. They automatically filtered all of their domains into 'adult' and 'non-adult' using a standard word list, and asked people who park with them to review all their domains and change the 'adult' state if required. You should definitely check your domains at TrafficValet. Their adult filter seems to flag a lot of domains as adult that are not actually adult domains.
Parked has continued to do well with certain domains, especially with their custom designed templates. iMonetize is doing a great job with one of my domains that did not do well elsewhere. Their system takes 30 days to determine where a domain will do best. I'll certainly leave digital-daycare.com with iMonetize.
ActiveAudience announced a new blog on December 21st. It does not have an RSS feed, but there is a feature that will email you whenever the page is updated. ActiveAudience launched 141 new themes in January. Changing themes to a more appropriate lander may improve the click-through rate on your domains, and it may improve revenue. They included the following partial list in their blog: Astronomy, Beer, Cancer Prevention, Consultants, Culture, Diving, Domain Names, Ecotourism, Extreme Sports, Family Names, Genealogy, Healthy Living, Hobbies, HR Services, How-To, Mental Health, Motivational, Nature, Office Supplies, Parenting, Products, Professional Services, Retirement, Sales and Marketing, Social Networking, Spanish, Surgery, Tourist, Theme Parks, Yachts, Volunteering
ActiveAudience is Highly Recommended.
SedoPro announced that they too have new landing pages. Four of the new landers are geared toward adult and gambling domains. The fifth is a simple search box as seen at MedicalSchool.in. They recommend this lander for domains that are difficult to optimize. As is sometimes the case, changes that you make manually in recommended keywords don't seem to show up on the site. I set this page to show the following keywords: Graduate Schools, Residency Programs, Hospitals, Pharmacy, Education, and Travel. Instead, as I write this, it continues to show: MP3s, Loans, Jobs, Internet Flowers, Shopping and Fitness.
Another gripe - Why does Sedo insist on placing their name in the title? This practically screams "PARKED PAGE!" to anyone who lands on a page. Instead of the title "MedicalSchool.in", Sedo insists on the following showing as the title: "Sedoparking.com - medicalschool.in info. This website is for sale!" At least allow us to change this on a domain-by-domain basis. Despite these minor gripes Sedo and SedoPro are highly recommended. NameDrive continues to give Sedo a run for it's money on .de and other European domains. U.S. domains are also doing well there this month. They are one of the sponsors of the Domain Channel conference February 2nd in London.
As mentioned above, ParkingDots has improved enough to again be highly recommended. This despite the fact that their tools are still somewhat crude compared to other services. While they do have attractive, theme-based landing pages, they have disabled one of their best features - the ability to choose a one-click or two-click lander. In fairness to them, this feature is also missing on all Yahoo-based systems. The best feature of ParkingDots is their payouts. They still pay 80% of revenue on parked domains. Try some of your domains with them if they seem to be under-performing elsewhere.
|
|
| | How will Yahoo Panama affect PPC?
Starting sometime in February Yahoo will implement "smart pricing" for all of their pay-per-click services. Google has had such a system for some time. Smart pricing will allow PPC links to rise to the top based on factors other than just price. "Traffic quality" is the term most often used for such factors. If a link results in a larger number of people actually clicking through and purchasing a product then this link may appear above a more expensive link that does not perform as well for the advertiser.
Nobody knows for sure how this will affect PPC parking. Some have predicted decreased income from Yahoo-based services as lower-paying links rise higher on pages. You can also make a case for increased income because of higher clickthroughs on these higher quality links. Yahoo stock rose briefly in late January when Yahoo announced that Panama would be in place ahead of schedule. We may know more by this time next month.
back to top |
|
| | | | Domainer's Magazine Arrives, Announces Subscription Prices
 Last month we announced the launch of "Domainer's Magazine." The first issue is arriving in mailboxes this week, and is being distributed at DomainFEST Global (and possibly at the DomainChannel conference in the U.K.). We were wrong about one thing - it will not be free-of-charge. A one year subscription is $38, and a two year subscription is $67.
I will send this newsletter out monthly or when there have been significant changes in the domain
name monetization industry. An extra issue may be sent when there is a major change
in a service that warrants your immediate attention. Back issues are available at NameMonetizer.com.
Leonard Holmes, Ph.D.CEO, Healing Sites Network, LLC You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the end of every issue. |
|
|
Blogs & Headlines 
