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Parking Service Reviews September 2008 - Name Monetizer #38
Parking Service Reviews September 2008 - Name Monetizer #38 
| September 2008 - Name Monetizer #38 |
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Parking income Down - Has it Hit Bottom? | Parking Panel gets a Facelift | More News from the Parking Companies |Recommended Services
Most of us have seen parking income drop in 2008. The decrease has not been obvious on all domains, but portfolio averages are down. Google AdWord and Yahoo/Overture ad rates don't seem to have decreased on most search terms, so there is speculation that Google and Yahoo may be keeping a bit more of the income. There is no way to really verify this, of course.
Dark Blue Sea, the parent company of Fabulous, reported a decline in domain revenue of almost 50% from first quarter 2007 to first quarter 2008 (Report here - pdf file). Tucows is perhaps best known as a shareware resource, but they are also a bulk domain registrar and the owner of 150,000 domain names. They reported in August that their revenue from domain parking dropped 12% in one quarter. Their CEO, Elliot Noss also said that parking revenue may have hit bottom. (Thanks to Andrew Allemann for reporting this in DomainNameWire.) Noss believes that "Google and Yahoo have pushed back on the payouts, they have also started to get more aggressive with some of the grayer parts of the market and long-term that affects us positively because we’ve got a very clean book of business. The more sort of bad traffic and bad clicks that are pushed out of the system, the better it is for us in the long-term.”
Parking Panel announced in August that they have new features, new templates, and a new feed provider. Apparently they lost their primary feed provider back in March, when ParkingDots went out of business for the same reason. Their new templates offer a large number of searches for people to click on. Some of the text does not seem to fit the container perfectly in Firefox, but expect some tweaks over time. Their "autopilot system" appears to learn what people are looking for and give them that. An example of their new templates can be seen at DiabeticHealthcare.com.Phishing affects NameMedia
NameMedia uncovered a 'phishing' scam targeting GoldKey and its customers. This is the second attack on a NameMedia property this year, following a similar attack on SmartName in July. According to NameMedia:
SmartName adds AdSense Ads to their Shops
SmartName now lets you put AdSense ads on your SmartName shops. This means that your Smart Name Shop can be monetized by both Shopping.com and Google. You can see these AdSense ads on sites such as TechnologyLiquidators.com. Adding this capability seems to have broken the header and footer text blocks for Smart Name Shops. In some cases header text shows up as a footer, and calls to external images, which worked before, no longer work. SmartName Shops
 is an intereesting and innovative approach, but you should currently treat it as beta software. Don't expect it to work perfectly. NameDrive eliminates their Searchbox Template
NameDrive announced on August 8th that they had dropped their "Searchbox" template. This was a nice template for parked domains that simply offered a search box on your domain. According to NameDrive:
Oversee.net cuts Staff Oversee.net laid off 10% of its staff in August. The company blamed recent problems in the economy. A spokesperson told SocalTech “the cuts were in response to the general economic weakness and pressures in the industry.” According to the report cuts were made across the board at SnapNames, DomainSponsor and Moniker. Early reports suggested that some executives were also laid off, but the company later denied this. Oversee still plans a DomainFEST Global conference in January. I hope to attend. 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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