Revenue share will always be different from what lands in your pocket.

Earlier today Google announced what percentage it is paying out to its self-service Adsense for Content and Adsense for Search publishers (68% and 51% respectively). It also announced that it hasn’t changed revenue share ever for Content and not since 2005 for Search (when it increased the payout).

I immediately heard moans “then why has my revenue been going down?”

There are a number of reasons your payout may be different from the overall percentage shared with publishers. I explained much of this in a previous post “The Google Squeeze: How Google’s Black Box Affects Partners’ Revenue“. For background you should read that article. But there are some additional relevant points to be made regarding Google’s announcement this morning:

1. It only disclosed rev shares for Content and Search feeds. Domain companies get these feeds plus an Adsense for Domains feed. Also, you get a combination of all of these feeds when you park your domains. So if the ratio of ads clicked across different feeds changes, your overall payout will change too.

2. The rates aren’t for negotiated contracts. Each parking company has a specifically-negotiated payout with Google. My understanding is that this generally ranges from 60%-75% depending on size. Also, parking companies often get a higher rev share percentage if they deliver more traffic. That can change frequently.

3. Parking companies pay out a percentage of what Google pays them. You probably make anywhere between 25% and 85% of what the parking companies are paid by Google. That percentage can change, too.

4. Smart pricing is killing you. Just to reiterate — this can drastically affect your RPC. Read my previous article.

5. Cost-per-click constantly changes. The topics of your domain may be in verticals that have seen a falling PPC price.

There are two good things that came from today’s announcement.

First, all of those “paid search experts” who’ve been running around talking about how Google’s falling “Traffic Acquisition Costs” means they’re paying a lower revenue share to Publishers can finally shut up. TAC changes based on a number of factors, and as I’ve written before, is a number that matters more to investors than Publishers.

Second, I think the payout from Google is very nice. Seriously. You have a huge ad network that does an incredible job optimizing which ads it shows at the right time to the right person to optimize click through and revenue. They take care of the instantaneous auction, tracking, ad delivery, and billing. This is all delivered to you by cutting-and-pasting a snippet of code into a web page. 68% sounds very good to me.

DotAsia joins the sTLD fee reduction band wagon.

DotAsia Organisation Ltd., which operates the .asia top level domain name, has requested that ICANN lower the fees DotAsia pays to ICANN.

DotAsia, a non-profit organization, currently pays a variable fee of 75 cents per domain name registered. It is requesting a 33% decrease to 50 cents per domain name.

In requesting the fee reduction, DotAsia writes:

A lower fee would enable DotAsia to invest further into meaningful community projects as well as to extend the awareness and adoption of the .ASIA domain. A lower fee from ICANN will also support a more level playing field, that would help DotAsia’s development and promote the equitable and inclusive development of the Asian economies, especially the developing and disadvantaged. The suggested amendment would also bring the fees into line with other gTLDs.

.Asia currently has about 200,000 domain names registered, so it is requesting its annual variable fees to be reduced from about $150,000 to $100,000.

The request for lower fees might be due to .Asia coming in at the low end of its projections. When it applied for .Asia, DotAsia stated:

Our target demand projection is based on a 5% penetration (335,600 domains) rate in the first year, growing to 10% by Year 3 and assumes a 10% annual growth of the overall market. The Low-Demand projection is based on a 3% penetration (201,500 domains) rate, growing to 5% in Year 3, while the High-Demand projection is based on a 7% penetration (489,000 domains) rate, growing to 16%.

ICANN recently reduced the registry fee for .Pro when it renewed the .Pro registry agreement.

Google discloses how much it pays its publishers.

After many years of complaining from publishers, Google has done an about-face on its stance on not disclosing how much money it passes along to its Adsense publishers.

In a blog post this morning, the company disclosed the numbers:

-68% of ad revenue paid to Adsense for Content Publishers
-51% of ad revenue paid to Adsense for Search Publishers

Furthermore, the company confirmed that it has paid out the same percentage to Content publishers since it launched the program in 2003. It has paid Search publishers 51% since 2005, when it increased the payout.

Interestingly, parking companies tell me they tend to get 65% to 75% revenue share from Google. If small publishers are getting 68%, that seems low for an aggregator. But consider that parking companies often access the search feed, which pays a lower percentage. Also, Google did not disclose how much it is paying from its “Adsense for Domains – Online” self service option, which may be lower

Keep in mind that even though the revenue share hasn’t changed, that doesn’t mean your payout per click hasn’t decreased. With “smart pricing”, Google is able to send higher click prices to its own properties and lower ones to its Adsense programs.

ICANN wants your feedback on international meetings, but it won’t be easy.

ICANN is kicking off its “Meetings for the Next Decade” consultation process to figure out how to handle its international meetings. ICANN has been criticized for its large travel budget for many years. I remember at DOMAINfest last year Steve Wozniak joking about when he was asked to join the ICANN board, and how he viewed it as just a way to take some free vacations during the year. (He declined.)

At any rate, ICANN wants your feedback and has set up a survey. But it’s a very difficult survey to complete.

First, you need to register. Then when you take the survey, each individual question is set up as a different poll. After submitting the first response I thought it was only a one-question survey, which didn’t make sense. You need to click on the “Poll Menu” link at the top of the page to see the other polls.

Poll question 2.1 asks “How often do you attend ICANN International Meetings?”, but there’s no option for “Never”.

Question 2.2 doesn’t actually ask a question, but states “Registry/Registrar Regional Meetings”, and it seems that the question is asking how often you’ve attended these meetings. Again, there’s no option for “Never”.

Question 3 asks a series of questions on what would make you more or less likely to attend a meeting. The last three questions have to do with the time it takes to travel to the event.

H. The amount of time it takes to travel to and from the meeting is less than 36 hours, door to door
I. The amount of time it takes to travel to and from the meeting is less than 24 hours, door to door
J. The amount of time it takes to travel to and from the meeting is less than 12 hours, door to door

It’s very hard to say what effect these have on your decision to go. Question H. includes both question I. and J. by how its worded. So if it’s less than 36 hours, that also could mean it’s less than 12 hours. So I can’t check the box “Would make me less likely to attend” for H the way it’s worded; if it asked “the total travel time is greater than 24 hours”, then I could select that answer.

Worse, question three doesn’t have a “not applicable” option and requires you to respond to each question. I think a lot of people will have a hard time answering “F. I have support from my employer to attend (financial or otherwise)”, because they don’t have an employer.

My suggestion: just send in a regular email comment for the consultation rather than completing the survey.

Flying.com parent company adds another web site to its collection.

UsedAirplanes, Inc., the parent company of Flying.com and UsedAirplanes.com, has purchased the domain name and web site UsedAircraft.com to add to its expanding arsenal of web properties.

Earlier this year the company acquired Flying.com for $1.1 million. I interviewed company President & CEO Mark J Horne at the time, and he explained the decision as a “no-brainer”:

“On an investment standpoint, if you had a million dollars cash right now, what do you do with it?,” asked Horne. “Stick it in the bank? You’d make $12,000 a year in interest on that money…you can’t stick it in the bank. To put it into an asset like this where I know the business well, it was a no-brainer.”

In justifying the acquisition cost of its new acquisition, Horne made points familiar to domain and web veterans:

The keyword “used aircraft” is one of the most highly used keywords in Google, Bing and Yahoo for people searching for used aircraft. On a monthly basis, Google, Yahoo and Bing will process several hundreds of thousands of search queries for the keyword “used aircraft” and millions more for search queries relating to “used aircraft.” These figures do not include all the users that forgo the search process by putting UsedAircraft.com into their URL or have the site bookmarked.

“UsedAircraft.com has been online for over 15 years and their long history gives them a compelling indexing value relative to the major search engines overall ranking algorithms including: Registration and Hosting Data (specifically the 15-year time value); High Trust/Authority (of the Host Domain); Link Popularity (of the Specific Page); Anchor Text (of External Links); On-Page Keyword Usage (throughout) and Traffic and Click-Through Data. The new website will also focus on increasing the Social Graph Metrics,” stated Horne.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but with added development costs the deal was described as a six-figure investment.