New service from Directi could boost industry.

Every once in a while you see a new product hit the domain name market that you really want to see succeed. DomainAdvertising.com from Directi is one of those.

DomainAdvertising.com has the potential to bring more advertising dollars to the domain traffic market. It is the first service I know of that will evangelize the value of domain traffic to advertisers. We all know that we can’t count on Google and Yahoo to do that.

The company offers a high touch service for advertisers to help them maximize the value they can get from the domain channel. That includes buying parked domain clicks from existing networks and directly from domain owners, leasing domain traffic, and buying domain redirects.

So what does that mean for domainers? I asked Alap Ghosh, VP – Strategy and Business Development, to break it down:

We’re a traffic monetization program for domain owners. They will park their domains with us and we will then use our advertising network relationships to maximize the revenue earned on traffic from the domains. The traffic will be sold in different inventory models and using different media formats, optimized for the traffic that we receive. We will also selectively bring services like domain leasing and domain brokering among others. Our focus is to directly evangelize the domain medium to advertisers and help them buy traffic. We believe that of all the online advertising mediums available today, domains bring the best return on ad investments. Advertisers, in turn, have given us a great response and we already have over 120 networks joined up.

Many claims in Sendori’s patent applications are denied.

Sendori, a domain name advertising service acquired by IAC in January, has hit some major roadblocks on patents it filed.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has sent a final notice of rejection (pdf) on a number of claims in Sendori’s application for “Domain Name Marketplace”, publication number 20080189192. It has also rejected a few of the claims in “Electronic Marketplace Used to Lease Domain Names and Redirect Web Surfers from Leased Domain Names”, publication number 20070260518.

Sendori provides a marketplace where advertisers can bid on redirects from domain names. For example, an advertiser that operates a video game store online could buy redirects from VideoGames.com.

The major issue Sendori is hitting is that the basic concept of its business was the same as a shuttered Advertising.com service called VisitorBid. When Sendori had its coming out party several years ago, I remember asking Sendori founder Ofer Ronen how his service was different from the one Advertising.com shuttered. He explained that it integrated better with domain owners’ portfolios (e.g., offering an API). That was probably the case, but trying to patent all aspects of the service should certainly be met with resistance.

Sendori still has a chance to reply to the final rejection.

New advertising option excludes parked domain names.

The settlement of a class action lawsuit against Yahoo may result in lower pay-per-click revenue for parked domain names.

The lawsuit was brought against Yahoo for allegedly misleading advertisers as to the sites where their ads would appear:

This class action was brought in 2006 by several Yahoo! pay-per-click search advertising customers. They allege that customers contracted for targeted ad placements through two products, “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” (and predecessor products provided by Overture Services, Inc. and GoTo.com, Inc.) and that Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.

As part of the settlement, Yahoo must create a new “Premium” ad placement option that will only show ads on Yahoo-owned web sites and other select parts of the content distribution network. This specifically excludes parked domain names:

“Premium Providers” means: (a) all web sites and web pages (including any microsite), software applications and other properties on the Internet that are owned or operated by Yahoo!; and, at Yahoo!’s option, (b) all parts of the Distribution Network other than: (i) domain name parking sites; (ii) bulk registration sites; (iii) “pop-up” or “pop-under” windows; (iv) typosquatting sites; (v) “sliders”; (vi)
“sidebars”; (vii) “injected ads”; or (viii) unsolicited spam email.

(See paragraph 22 of this settlement agreement)

It’s painful to see parked domain names being lumped together with spam emails.

Smart pay-per-click advertisers know how to manage the content network to get a high ROI. But lazy ones — and those that don’t have much knowledge of the network — will likely opt in to only showing their ads on Premium Providers.

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.

Sedo acquires another domain name parking company.

In a long rumored transaction, Sedo has acquired domain name parking company ParkingPanel.com for an undisclosed price.

ParkingPanel was launched in 2006, but ran into a few roadblocks. In March of 2008 it lost its advertising feed and was forced to look for an alternate provider. It announced its relaunch in August of 2008. But, like many small domain name parking companies, it has faced a tough slough in today’s domain parking environment.

Sedo will incorporate the ParkingPanel.com brand into its own, and transition all of ParkingPanel’s customers over to Sedo. This transition should be completed before the end of the month.

Sedo acquired another small parking company, RevenueDirect, in February of 2009 for $825,000.