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Newsletter Issues March 2008
Newsletter Issues March 2008 
| February 2008 Name Monetizer #31 |
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Domain Monetization companies Shuffle the Deck | More News from the Parking Services | What is Traffic Quality - another take| Domainer's Choice Awards | Recommended Services
January saw additional consolidation in the domain industry as companies continue to work for a competitive advantage. Oversee.net, the parent company of DomainSponsor and SnapNames acquired the domain registrar Moniker early in the month. You may remember that Moniker and DomainSponsor had a very public disagreement last year when Moniker's TrafficClub service dropped DomainSponsor and DomainSponsor then apparently harvested whois information in order to contact Traffic Club members and solicit them to work with DomainSponsor directly. Now these entities are one big happy company - except that TrafficClub is no more. Existing TrafficClub accounts are being moved to DomainSponsor. How ironic is that?
Later in the month Oversee.net announced that it "executed a definitive agreement with Oak Hill Capital Partners, a private equity firm, for an investment of $150 million in Oversee.net’s holding company." According to Oversee, "the funds will be used to augment organic growth and acquire technologies that will enhance its suite of services in the online marketing and domain name industries". I guess it also helped pay for the Moniker deal.
Sedo announced that they have made an investment in the Italian company Domainsbot, described as "the world leader in the semantic domain search market." Domainsbot technology is used by partners such as GoDaddy, Register.com, 1&1 and Tucows. How will this impact Sedo's domain parking? It may not.
TrafficZ made all of their domain owners confirm that they read a statement prohibiting arbitrage - the practice of buying Pay-per-click ads and sending the traffic to parked domains. This risky practice can sometimes pay off if you can send cheap traffic to expensive ads. According to TrafficZ "our representatives at Yahoo/Overture have informed us that the prohibition against arbitrage applies across the entire Yahoo Publisher Network. We understand that arbitrage can be very profitable when implemented in ways to ensure quality, targeted traffic; however, at this time, the practice is prohibited." If you read between the lines, the statement seems to be unofficially suggesting that you should target things very carefully if you decide to do arbitrage at TrafficZ. Only Parked continues to semi-officially allow arbitrage.
TrafficZ took advantage of their captive audience to announce some upcoming developments. They announced that
 they will be unveiling an upgrade - TrafficZ 5.0 - at the Las Vegas T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in February. It's not really clear exactly what will be new. TrafficZ reports that the new platform will include "enhanced reporting capabilities, robust analytics tools, our new Advanced Learning Technology, and even greater flexibility over the look and feel of your domains with the introduction of ZTemplate." NameDrive experienced a short period of downtime on January 25th - in the middle of DomainFest. They reported that the down time "was due to an attack on our service and took our homepage down for a while. Parking was affected for only 10 minutes before we got on top of it." NameDrive also announced a new feature. When you are on the add domains screen you now have the option to add a comment on each domain as well. According to NameDrive "this saves you having to go to the individual domain'sscreens to add your own comments". Our WhyPark domains continue to gain some pagerank and some traffic with their content-rich approach.
Donny Simonton from Parked is one of the most responsive and blunt spokespersons for any parking company. In a recent DNForum public thread he responded to complaints that domainers had concerning the "traffic quality" of their domains. His explanation is reproduced below. You can read the entire thread here.
One of the highlights of the recent DomainFest Global conference was the awarding of the Domnainer's Choice Awards, voted on by domainers. Here are the winners:
Recommended Services - There were no changes in our recommendations this month.
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. For a variety of content related to domains and SEO check out DomainerSEO.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. |
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