Yahoo-based domain services, such as TrafficZ, Parked, WhyPark, and SmartName, are reporting that their U.S. and Canadian ads are now coming from Microsoft’s Bing service. Yahoo is still running the ad networks in some other countries, and the parking companies have deals with secondary providers for traffic from additional countries. This switch was supposed to be revenue neutral – but when does that ever happen? Most domain owners and some parking execs are reporting a slight decrease in income. Donny Simonton of Parked reported on 10/31 that
Since 100% of the traffic is at Bing, our numbers are down quite a bit. But we don’t know what is going on either. I have talked to other parking companies and people who have direct feeds with Yahoo and they are seeing the same issues on their side.
Domain owners have also noted stats and reporting delays. Bing is said to be sending the numbers to Yahoo and Yahoo is sending them to the parking companies. This is a new role for the people at Bing, and they may be just working the kinks out. Yahoo and Bing are supposed to be continuing to give companies the same share of total revenue that they did before, but some are skeptical about this. Apparently singular and plural search terms can sometimes pay very differently on Bing. Parked reportedly is planning to implement systems to automatically display ads for the better search term – singular or plural.
Kudos to Donny Simonton of Parked for keeping everyone up-to-date on this change. SmartName also sent everyone an email letting them know about the change, but not in the blow-by-blow manner that Donny covered this change.
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