The lazy days of summer often mean a decrease in Internet traffic and Online income. People are busy taking vacations and enjoying the outdoors. There was some news from companies involved in parking this month, but the news was not directly related to their parking services.
Sedo held their first GreatDomains.com domain auction in July. They describe their auction system this way:
In order to auction your domain on GreatDomains you must have a Sedo account. Every month, GreatDomains will hold at least one Premium Auction Event featuring the finest domain names on the market. If you have a domain you would like to Auction with GreatDomains, please list the domain for sale at Sedo.com and then apply for a Premium Auction through the Domain Management system. Simply check off the domain or domains you wish to submit an application for and then change the drop down box at the bottom of the page to “Apply for a Premium Auction” and hit “execute”. Domain Names featured in GreatDomains Premium Auctions will be hand picked by Sedo’s expert brokerage team and aggressively marketed to a worldwide audience of motivated, pre-qualified buyers. You will be informed via email if your application has been accepted and the domain will have a GreatDomains logo next to it in your Domain Management system.
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Traffic Quality scores - have you seen yours? Services that use Yahoo landing pages promised in June to share the "quality scores" for domainers' portfolios. I haven't seen mine yet, have you seen yours? I don't blame the domain parking companies - the fault is likely with Yahoo. I didn't really expect to see mine any time soon.
Parked and
TrafficZ both use Yahoo feeds and income has held-up very well.
Parked continues to lead the pack, possibly because they use both Yahoo and Ask.com to power their service.
Active Audience and
GoldKey are the other Yahoo-based services that we currently recommend, although they still seem to be playing catch-up after a failed attempt to monetize with Google a few months back. These two services are essentially twins, with
Active Audience reserved for larger portfolio owners.
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Why should a domainer go to Affiliate Summit? I attended in July and I can suggest a few reasons.
Affiliate Summit is the premier conference for Online affiliate marketing. Domainers who are developing their domains into full-blown destination sites can monetize these domains using affiliate programs. Affiliate Summit brings together affiliate program managers and affiliate marketers. Domainers are most similar to the affiliate marketers who are at affiliate summit. Both domainers and affiliate marketers have websites and are trying to monetize the traffic to those sites. Affiliate marketers usually have a small number of sites, while domainers usually have hundreds of sites. Many of the techniques used by affiliate marketers won't scale to a large domain portfolio. Instead, think about using these techniques for the top 5% of your domains.
For the last few months this newsletter has chronicled many of the ongoing changes in domain monetization. The traditional PPC (pay-per-click) services have been including elements of CPA (cost-per-action) in their services, sometimes paying only when a transaction takes place. The push for "traffic quality" is a similar change - where clicks are now valued based on how likely they are to result in an actual sale. These changes are pushing domain monetization slowly toward CPA territory. We're not there yet, though.
Affiliate programs are still a far cry from PPC domain parking. Some of the major differences:
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Income from affiliate programs comes in spurts, with long dry spells in between. If you are accustomed to seeing 20 clicks a day, a sale every 3 or 4 days can be a bit unnerving - even if the sale totals more than the clicks would have totaled.
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There are more players to deal with, and it can get a little confusing. Generally you are working with an affiliate manager, and also with an affiliate management program, such as
LinkShare which manages the day-to-day operation of the affiliate program.
Go to
Affiliate Summit if you want to develop a few of your domains with content and are looking for a place to start. Another reason to go to
Affiliate Summit is because other domainers don't go. Go if you want to buy domains (assuming Moniker tries an auction there again). The domains auctioned by Moniker at Affiliate Summit went for much lower prices than at TRAFFIC (although Moniker's escrow process is very slow to turn over domains that you bought).
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Parking Empire offers a CPA program for domainers. It had to happen. The developers of
CPA Empire are now offering a CPA-based program just for domainers.
Parking Empire is essentially a spin-off of CPA Empire. The company originally monetized email campaigns, and has been moving into more web-based services. There have been
accusations of spamming, most recently from MySpace. I'm not overly impressed with the quality of the offers at either
Parking Empire or
CPA Empire, but they do have a good selection of leads available in certain niches. I met Scott Richter recently at a domain event, and he seemed like a nice guy. I'm optimistic that this company has changed for the better.
There's a new
CPA Section at ParkQuick to track companies that monetize on a CPA or Affiliate basis. More content will be added to this section over time. For now, the PPC parking services are still the main event, while CPA is essentially a side-show. Some are predicting that this will change over time.
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Parked continues to provide nice checks twice a month
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Sedo and Sedo Pro are the top Google-based services with one-click ads available for all domains
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TrafficZ is recommended for the absolute best landing pages and great stats
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