Above.com Optimizes Domain Parking Revenue
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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.
Further Reading:
- Hey Michael, There Are a Number of Variables at Play in Domain Parking Revenue
- Comwired Geo-Optimizes your Domain Traffic
- Sedo and Parked Still Top Domain Parking Companies, But Revenue Down
Tags: above.com, Domain Parking
Above.com Optimizes Domain Parking Revenue – http://tinyurl.com/ydwfbhn
I’ve been testing it for a week (around 100 domains and 3 different parking services) and already noticed an improvement. I don’t earn a huge amount from parking so I’d probably never take the time to do a split testing experiment myself – but the ability to have it all automated makes it very easy.
Also like having the consolidated stats in one place, can imagine for someone using all the parking services supported this would represent a fair time saving in itself.
Like you say in the article, given the general environment is falling revenues, even more important to maximise what you can.
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Above.com Optimizes Domain Parking Revenue http://ff.im/-9ppiS
Dan, do you see any trends?
Is it really that some parking companies pay better, so most of your sites end up on the same parking?
Or, do they really get spread around a little bit?
Andrew,
Any ideas how above.com’s product compares to products in the marketplace that have been doing this prior? Is there more innovation in their approach vs. past products?
Tan
Kewl..signing up now. I had never even heard/seen Above.com