Best Domainer Mardi Gras discount ends soon.

Early bird rates for Domainer Mardi Gras end October 15, so now is the time to register if you plan to make the trip. Early bird registration is $795, but if you also book your hotel room at the conference hotel, you’ll get admission for only $495. The hotel is a good deal, too, so this will probably be your most affordable conference opportunity for 2010.

Domainer Mardi Gras (DMG) organizers sent a multi-page brochure to thousands of domainers this past week. If you didn’t get it, you can view it here (pdf).

This year’s event is being managed by Michael Ward. Few people in the industry have a better understanding of all facets of the domain industry — from registries to registrars to regulation to monetization — than Ward. Last year’s event was memorable because of the parties. I expect this year’s event will be memorable for both the parties and the programming.

Registration is available online.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

Related posts:

1. Domainer Mardi Gras Set for February Return
2. Domainer Mardi Gras to Focus on Risk Management
3. Domainer Mardi Gras Starts Today

Best Domainer Mardi Gras discount ends soon.

Early bird rates for Domainer Mardi Gras end October 15, so now is the time to register if you plan to make the trip. Early bird registration is $795, but if you also book your hotel room at the conference hotel, you’ll get admission for only $495. The hotel is a good deal, too, so this will probably be your most affordable conference opportunity for 2010.

Domainer Mardi Gras (DMG) organizers sent a multi-page brochure to thousands of domainers this past week. If you didn’t get it, you can view it here (pdf).

This year’s event is being managed by Michael Ward. Few people in the industry have a better understanding of all facets of the domain industry — from registries to registrars to regulation to monetization — than Ward. Last year’s event was memorable because of the parties. I expect this year’s event will be memorable for both the parties and the programming.

Registration is available online.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

Related posts:

1. Domainer Mardi Gras Set for February Return
2. Domainer Mardi Gras to Focus on Risk Management
3. Domainer Mardi Gras Starts Today

Above.com optimizes your domain parking revenue.

A lot of people are complaining about falling domain parking revenues. To counteract the drop, they’re turning to domain development. But there’s a simpler solution: optimizing your current parking revenue.

I’ve been testing Above.com, a domain parking optimization service, for the past couple weeks. It does as advertised: optimizes your domains across parking companies to maximize revenue.

Above.com is a free service from Trellian, a keyword research company. It makes money from referral fees to parking companies and also plans to offer a paid version in the future.

To start, you link your parking accounts to Above.com. (About ten parking companies are supported, including many of the ones on ParkingJudge). Then you input your domains and change to the Above.com nameservers. The service kicks in, split testing your traffic across your preferred parking companies, ultimately pointing the domain to the company that provides the most revenue.

There are a couple other perks to Above.com beyond just maximizing revenue. First, it allows you to see all of your parking stats in one central location, rather than logging in to each account. Second, Above.com uses its nameservers’ traffic logs to compare to your parking company’s stats. This is important because all parking companies report visits differently. This means the RPM (revenue per thousand) they report can’t be easily compared to another parking company. Now you can see how many visitors actually visited the domain and calculate a true RPM for each company.

It’s difficult to understand exactly how Above.com tests traffic, and additional variants (such as country breakdown) would be a nice addition.

But Above.com is a nice improvement over the old method of split testing traffic, which was usually to use parking aggregators such as TrafficClub. Parking ad feed providers frowned on these services, which aggregated all of your revenue and paid you directly (keeping a cut for themselves).

Although Above.com leaves keyword optimization and domain-by-domain optimization up to you, it’s a great service for testing domains across multiple parking companies.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

Related posts:

1. Monetize This: iMonetize enters domain parking optimization play
2. TrafficClub adds SBX to paid parking program
3. Comwired Geo-Optimizes your Domain Traffic