Morning Folks!!
Now I see the numbers and now I can say without doubt that the entire landscape of the domain industry is about to have a dramatic shift. The single biggest shift EVER! An earthquake.
There is no question in my mind that folks are about to shift their TRUE type in traffic to Frank or one of the new companies using Frank's feed like Domain Power and another company set to make an announcement next week.
NEVER have so many domains and so much traffic shifted to one specific entity in this short a time with so much more to come. NUMBERS! That traffic is coming from all these other parking companies and implosion is not out of the question. I'll explain why in a moment.
The mini site has transformed into lead generation, email capture and other models that are taking advantage of the strengths of each individual domain.
The other day I mentioned that your current parking company was “Hosing” you if you have pure type in traffic. Now I can confirm it. Hosed is not the adjective I would use today. Today I would use something much stronger.
So as this unfolds you are going to see some wild stuff going down as these companies scramble to stay afloat. They are going to tell you how strong they are but that may not last long. Their traffic is being gutted as I write this. The BEST traffic. They are watching the OIL come out and they are about to be stuck with the mud. Slow moving mud with limited traffic.
A company can only lose about 35% of their business before they collapse. We are going to see some very aggressive marketing while they FIGHT for survival. Some may not make it and the ones that do will be smaller and weaker. NO DOUBT!
Stay tuned. All I know is NUMBERS and the NUMBERS are about to bury the greedy. Wait til you find out how much this shit is costing you. You are going to KNOW things you don't want to know. Let's see how many will still carry water for these companies once the truth is known.
If you have PURE type in traffic you will be STUNNED by the numbers. Domainers have taken back control of their industry and there are going to be some very unhappy folks!
What will those companies say when you have a domain making .86 cents a day and then starts making $30????????? Sorry we have been screwing you all this time?? Sorry we were getting fat on YOUR traffic??? Sorry we were taking MOST of the payouts?? Sorry but we are FRIENDS?? BULLSHIT!!!
Now obviously this is the most extreme case right now. But the increase overall is staggering. So....
Sorry guys, you got away with it long enough. It's OVER BABY!! Enjoy the mud.
And if you don't believe it.....see what I wrote back in 2009 when I suggested that an event like this could and WOULD do! I am sure I suggested it even before that. Why?? Because I have seen it happen before.
'One new solution by any of these companies has the power to disrupt the entire sector. It could put companies out of business virtually overnight. The market is fragile and no sponsor could afford a mass movement of traffic and survive.'
And here is a classic from 2008. I described the event. but as always, it is the timing. So here we are NOW. Just 2 or 3 years off schedule. ;-)
And for the record, I don't want to see anyone go out of business. But I do enjoy seeing the oil separated from the rest of the mix and having the existing companies get paid FAIRLY for the service they provide. Will it be too little too late? Certainly is not up to me.
Have a GREAT Day!!
Rick Schwartz
-----
Domain Lords
The first thing a real SEM manager does for a client is turn off all content and partners.
That forces expensive ppc to be on the real traffic maker, the top SE’s. Google/yahoo/bing
Since this involves pure ‘type ins’, which I believe is not a major traffic generator at all, since most users do not type in a .com, they look on a SE, I doubt this seismic shift will do much.
Parking was a tip of an iceberg, the real money is in ppc from the top SE’s, and type ins get none of it really, since they companies paying big dollars to SE’s, all cut out off site ads, it’s all low conversion crap.
So in the big picture, the crap companies get consolidate into a big septic tank for ‘type ins’, the big thing you are pushing that in reality is nothing in the ‘big picture’.
So yeah, parking companies are all being destroyed since that’s SEM 101, eliminate the offsite revenue companies, stick to the big SE’s, they have high ROI and high conversion ratios.
The industry is much more complicated that you are portraying, yeah, parking is a done industry, it’s over. SEM managers killed it.
Now you’ll see, no one is buying ads from anything but SE’s in most cases.
So put all the crap in one sewer system.
My 3 cents
Dean
I have started the process this week of transferring my parked domains to a landing page I created. I am considering putting affiliate links on my pages, but have not gotten that far yet. I agree, the majority of parking companies are a complete waste of time monetarily, I suspect they are the only one’s benefiting from the traffic I am (was) sending them.
Homero A. Gonzalez
Good the”HTFJYRTZYSXW” is gone!!
Rick, would you be willing to put specific examples of domains to illustrate how parking companies are screwing their”Parkees”? (is that a word??. Of course it would be cool if you name the parking company. Readers, anyone?
Jack
I hope to see Sedo get put out of business. We’ll wait and see what happens.
Dean
I am not going to name names or call people and companies out… but WhyPark when it’s a complete waste of time, Lol.
Gazzip
Are they any examples yet and is there also an increase in the actual traffic being reported?
Mike
@DomainLords…..oh goodness….you are soooooooooooooo naive as to type in traffic.
Are you really that ignorant?
Quote:”Since this involves pure ‘type ins’, which I believe is not a major traffic generator at all…….”
Really? You are either insanely domain ignorant or biased against it. Type in traffic has been around since the beginning and anyone that has ever looked at it for a second knows it is real.
There is more type in traffic around than you could ever imagine.
BullShitWebsites
Breaking News—Breaking News
Fabulous filed for bankruptcy
Parked-gone too
parking Panel–long gone
WhyF-ark—opps…gone
Sedo—park in the A-ss
InternetTraffic—-got bought by Google for 1000billion so as not to compete with them.
SF
Seems like I remember reading that Frank was developing a system which allowed customers to purchase advertising directly on parked domains.
It would be a monumental task. But, it would be very cool to see things head in that direction.
Uzoma
I actually want some type of criminal sanctions on any domain parking company that is guilty of keeping most of the revenue so selfishly. This act is the single most destructive thing done to this industry. A domain investor is left to pay thousands in renewal fees while some idiotic mafia gangster domain parker keeps all the revenue, or pay a few cents a year to the domainer? It’s a SIN and a CRIME!
I want them punished by the law, if Schillings model can demonstrate, empirically, that they were skimming 99% or more of the revenue from advertisers, and I suspect most of them were. These parkers are doing business without transparency. How can you pay someone .05cents on a revenue of $900? And by the way, how do they avoid their pants catching on fire, or their noses growing longer than Pinocchio’s?
Lda
I suspect that Frank will soon have a huge critical mass of
additional traffic under his management and the leverage to
wrangle some truly innovative monetizations of that traffic.
I’ve thought for years that if Frank also parlayed the trust we
have in him into a public expansion of his private Caymans based
registrar, he could easily have the likes of Godaddy trembling.
Rick Schwartz
What’s going on behind the scenes is some of these parking companies are doing everything they can to derail Frank. The eyes of the industry are watching. Stop hounding Yahoo and Google and start paying out what you should be. That’s your salvation. Innovate and pay or step aside.
petrogold
@DomainLords,
Your all feedback found very powerful.Could you please elaborate with tips factors to develop a domain,niche,affiliate,leads,leasing etc.Appreciate it as makes sense!!
Uzoma
Here’s why I haven’t rushed to move my domains to Schillings: the cabal to deny revenue to the domainer runs deep; Google and Yahoo, and other Search engines, the Registrars, and so on, probably have a way to multiplex a domain, such that the root of search entry is duplicative –by that I mean that when someone types in a domain name, it’s probably cornered somehow, I simply don’t trust any of these players; NOT even Schillings is a match for these people.
I can only support a system that generates direct revenue from advertisers, and shows openness to the entire process; if Schillings has to rely on any of these big boys? Forget it. They will NEVER play fair; they will bury him. Therefore, I’m not moving my domains yet, until he is totally independent. I think his model is flawed, he should do direct pitch to advertisers, with the help of all domainers, especially the King, and I
Rich
Take it easy Uzoma, Shilling does not take any body that makes less then 50k a year in parking,i woud think that about at least 20,000 domains.Do you have that many?if not …relax
Uzoma
Rich, you are telling me why Schilling could reject a domainer, and I’m telling you why a domainer should reject Schilling; both valid points to make. I thought Schwartz’s criterion was based on traffic and quality of the domain, rather than magnitude? In either case, we need a comprehensive approach to the PPC/CPC question. Unless domains are restored to investment grade, by that i mean that an average domain should make at the minimum registration fee for the owner, actually, the average domain should get whatever was parked on it, period! Every single domain I own has got these pretty ads, mostly fortune 500 companies, displaying these gorgeous ads on them, they should pay something for that no matter what, whether someone clicked on them or NOT. This is above Schilling alone, this is about the whole industry, Rich. I’m not here to worship anybody.
Lda
> Take it easy Uzoma, Shilling does not take any body that
> makes less then 50k a year in parking,
Is that figure factual ?
Have you written to his contact ?
I’d be interested to hear precise details of his
entry requirements.
> i woud think that about at least 20,000 domains.
> Do you have that many?if not …relax
20K domains x (Reg. Fee) is way above $50K
So unless you’re topping up the pot with about $100K
of sales etc ….. that 20K portfolio needs serious pruning.
Josh
Man alive, someone offers you a way to make more money by doing what your already doing, and you find fault with that? Really???
Rich
Lda@
I got a response back from the inquiring that i had to Frank’s platform.The response from Frank was that if i’m not making $50k-$100k or more,minimum threshold levels for traffic volume is required.He suggested that i should go and use somebody else,and he did point out a different company to me.
conference venue
Everything will increase in value. Hopefully, salaries will increase too.
Frank Williams
This is definitely interesting stuff. A few points based on my experience as a former Yahoo employee, and as someone who has been a client of domain parking companies (at different times).
– I can’t speak for Google, or Yahoo anymore, but while I was there Yahoo was definitely not taking some huge amount of money out of the funnel between advertiser and end domainer. Yahoo gets paid by the advertiser, and then has a revenue share agreement with the parking company, where the parking company is getting a much larger cut of each $1 than Yahoo was. There’s no way Yahoo could be skimming extra money or things like that, it’s a public company that would get in major trouble if it was lying to Parking companies about how much advertisers were really paying.
– Now for parking companies, I have no insight into whether any of them are lying to their customers about the revenue they are receiving. Most people working with parking companies have revenue share agreements, so parking companies have to be acting pretty dirty to be taking more of the pie than they’ve agreed upon with a client.
– A wrinkle in the mix that starts to get complex is that Yahoo would have to lower payouts to parking companies based on quality scores, and the parking companies passed that on to their end domainer clients. Why did Yahoo do this? Because they often refunded or lowered what advertisers were paying when traffic was low quality or performed badly.
– I didn’t have direct insight, but someone told me once that the”domain channel” did not really do a great job separating type-in traffic from arbitraged garbage traffic that came in from domains. It would surprise me that this was the case, but I suppose it’s possible. Yahoo SHOULD have done a good job of being able to identify that domain parking client A had a high quality score and should get high payouts while domain parking client B had bad traffic and got lower payouts. I say SHOULD because I can’t confirm that, and I don’t know what the parking companies might do in the middle of that.
– Also, once you get middle people in the transactions, payouts go down. Let’s say an advertiser pays $1 per click. Yahoo then might take 0.25 of that and pass 0.75 to the parking company. The parking company then has a 60/40 deal with the domainer, so the end domainer gets 0.45. Some parking companies also may be getting a feed from a larger parking company which would then cut that even further. Then throw in some quality score deductions, and it’s easy to see how that $1 becomes a low payout.
– So, as one commenter suggested, isn’t the best option to get ads directly from the advertisers? Obviously so, if that was really possible to do at scale. The keyword search marketplaces have hundreds of thousands to millions of advertisers across EVERY category. These advertisers really want the search engine traffic, not domain traffic. Even if type-in is valuable, which I believe it is, it’s not what they are really after. They should be, but they just don’t know. The competition also drives up their bids significantly. Therefore, starting a service that gets direct advertisers at scale for domains has a huge chicken and egg problem to get enough supply to attract advertisers and enough advertisers to create competition and have large domainers use the service. That’s a tough road.
– It’s cool to see Frank doing this, I hope it works out well for everyone. If he can negotiate better rates than parking companies, and pass on more of the revenue to his clients, then that’s fantastic.
Uzoma
To: Frank Williams
Yours was a very good post. It made no assumptions whatsoever, and that is both good and bad. With the domain industry, you’ve got to make certain assumptions. The Search giants, and the parking companies do NOT reveal much to the domain owners. We are in the dark, as far as what advertisers paid, so right there we have to assume that they (search giants and domain parking co.) do have something to hide; if the money was what they claim or smaller, they will reveal it, it’s probably larger, much much larger, as a matter of fact, I am assuming it is immensely larger. It could in fact be unbelievably larger. Where I have a problem with the whole arrangement is in the set up of the deal. Who decided to go the route of pay per click? Why not just pay someone for running ads on their domain? Besides, the sort of money that these Search giants, and domain parking companies arranged as pay is absolutely stupid; they have NO RESPECT for us domainers at all, else how do you set your mouth to tell someone they earned 3 cents on a say a GM ad put on your domain? Or a General Electric ad? You’ve got to be one of the most vile human beings to cut such a deal on our behalf. We are Americans, with responsibility, and households to support, some of us have kids to train in college…. why rip us of like that? They should think this thing thru, i don’t think they have. They are hurting themselves just as much as hurting us. Pay the domainer, and they will renew their domains, and buy some more.
Target Domain Names
As always with the balls on the desk ;)
It`s an open secret, that the big p. companies are robbing us since years. There have been many, many intents to make our lives easier, and here is Frank now with all eyes on him.
I hope this time it works out.
So far he seems quite a pain in their butts ;)
Domain Lords
some answers
domain lords use a 5 tiered system of income for development and it’s all connected to END USERS, the only part that is connected to the thieves with mba’s that control google and yahoo/bing is we grab a huge piece of the SEM/ppc budget our clients agree to give to the great evil giants.
our spiel is the average biz owner has ZERO chance going up against google/yah/bing
ZERO
so we supply the key, a keyword for the end user that will do many things and we get FIVE WAYS to let an end user have use of our IP asset(s)
a. domain name use
b. content that converts
c. seo that works
d. map management
e. sem/ppc management
so end user then has a real legit IT team with multiple experts BATTLING google/yah/bing
but we level the playing field, we have the keywords they need and we know how to use them to BUY goo/yah/bing right
then we have the content that really converts, 10% to 120% response ratios
yeah, you can get over 100% response ratios by billboarding on some terms
anyway, that’s the real future of domains, if you own a real asset worth developing, you can make FIVE REVENUE STREAMS, and none are from adsense or parking
that’s the FUTURE of the net, the real use of these assets to help end users
a. battle goo/yah/bing
b. dominate their industry
me naive?
no, I’ve seen it all on the net and type ins were never a major thing, NEVER, except for a short time in the very beginning, then it was all manipulation of SE’s
why bother with a typein when 99%+ of the users are on SE’s looking for who is #1?
anyone that is banging the drum of type ins has ZERO CLUE
you want traffic, it’s easy to get, you develop for the top keywords people look for, you hit a few terms YOU HAVE TRAFFIC, now what, how do you make money with, the crap domainers have been doing for years was BS
absolute garbage and low asset yields
the only real income was what some got selling gems worth 100 times in reality for what they sold the keywords
99.99999% of domains are pretty much worthless
you own a gem, don’t sell, develop and that means find end user and use the domain to battle the giants and dominate the comp
case closed
neXt
Viva
Reply to Domain Lords,
Thank you for the guidance and great post.
Do you provide the services you are advocating, because I am interested.
If I had one or maybe even three gems, would you be interested in developing them for me for mutual benefit?
Domain Lords
Sorry viva, I don’t touch stuff I don’t own. There’s others in the game that are part of ‘domain lords’ that can be hired, but not me. I got a ton of residual income, I own a ton of high cpc terms that all have room for hundreds of sub domain clients. So I’m really not here to offer development services. But if anyone has a high grade professional term, they can contact us at the site. But we know all the owners of the domains we want, so I doubt any of them are here. But you never know, we buy spec stuff all the time if the cpc term is over 20 bucks. Very few domains are that high in cpc, but that’s our wants. So good luck.