Above.com Optimizes Domain Parking Revenue

Author: domainnamewire

10 Oct

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.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

Scenes from SedoPro Event in Key West, Florida

Author: domainnamewire

9 Oct

SedoPro event kicks off.

The SedoPro Partner Forum opened last night in Key West, Florida.

Getting to the event turned into a bit of a challenge for some attendees. I got stuck on a plane in Dallas, resulting in missing my connection in Miami to the island. I caught the next flight, which had about a half dozen people going to the event. But American Airlines had a few problems — apparently letting people on to the plane who didn’t have tickets — which led to a long, hot delay on a cramped prop plane on the runway in Miami.

But it was worth the trouble. The setting for the event is beautiful, right on the beach in Key West. Last night started with cocktails on the beach, followed by a pasta and seafood dinner and dessert.

There was also a panel discussion with Bob Diener, who founded what later became Hotels.com, and Tessa Holcomb, the Sedo broker that recently sold Diener GetARoom.com for his latest venture. Diener explained how he got into the online travel reservation business and grew Hotels.com into a public company. He discussed how they purchased the Hotels.com domain name. Hotels.com was an affiliate for its company, so it negotiated to buy Hotels.com based on the affiliate revenue and traffic it was already generating.

It was great to hear an end user discuss how he bought domain names, especially a brandable name like GetARoom.com

Today’s events include a couple sessions and then an afternoon of scuba diving, jet skis, and other outdoor activities. That will be followed by dinner and a gala (Key West style) tonight.

Here’s a montage of scenes from the opening night last night:

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.