Yahoo recently imposed a revenue cap on doman parking income on certain TLDs. TrafficZ reported that the affected TLDs "include .biz, .co, .info, .tv, and .us." leaving open the possibility that other TLDs might also be capped. According to TrafficZ on 8/16: The new, conservative revenue cap was rolled out early this morning and will be imposed on... Continue Reading →
“Bing Sucks”
Donny Simonton shoots straight. After trying to spin the horrible numbers domain owners were seeing from domain parking company Parked this past month he finally came right out and sait it - "Bing Sucks." (Read down this thread to see the transformation in his attitude.)
Domain monetization companies such as Parked (and WhyPark), TrafficZ, and SmartName, have depended on Yahoo's ads to power their services. Yahoo switched their ad inventory to Microsoft's Bing service in November and lots of problems cropped-up.
Domain monetization is new for Bing. They have had an AdWords-like platform for some time, but they have not worked with domain parking companies. It seems that their stats reporting system was not up to the challenge initially. They had to start from scratch figuring out issues like traffic quality - a multiplier they use based on how likely they think your traffic's clicks will result in an actual sale. In most cases they seemed to estimate low, and there were reports that these quality scores would change on a daily basis for no reason.
I reached out to Parked and WhyPark, TrafficZ, and SmartName with some questions about their experiences to date. Only Parked and WhyPark have responded to date. Donny asked Craig Rowe of WhyPark to respond for both services, since they work together to optimize their Bing feed.
Here are Craig's responses to my questions:
TrafficZ’s New Monetization Models
TrafficZ is one of the companies reeling from the drop in revenue associated with the switch from Yahoo to Bing. They recently announced a sneak peak of a new monetization model that will be less dependent on pay-per-click parking. Their new model includes CPA (Cost per Action) - "Clients get paid when a user... Continue Reading →
TrafficZ fixes Domain Manager Problem
TrafficZ notified users yesterday that they fixed the problems with their backend that domainers use to manage their domains. I received emails on June 10th stating that they were having network issues stemming from our hosting company. This will not affect revenue in any way. All parking pages are currently functional; however, use of the... Continue Reading →
TrafficZ and Boswell Part Ways
Jonathan Boswell has left TrafficZ to focus on his private equity company Boswell Investments. Jonathan was one of the founders of LeaseThis.com, which was bought by Thought Convergence and integrated with TrafficZ to some extent. He was General Manager of TrafficZ for the last year.Andrew Allemann reported that "he and the TrafficZ co-founders have decided... Continue Reading →
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