While Sedo’s earnings continue on a downward path, some metrics point to improvements.

In a lot of ways, Sedo Holding’s quarterly financial report (pdf) published yesterday was more of the same.

The company saw its performance at Sedo weaken, while its affiliate business affilinet grew a bit.

But there were also a couple positive metrics for Sedo. The number of domains listed on Sedo increased by 1.7 million and it also increased the number of parked domains on its platform by 300,000.

Overall, though, Sedo’s domain parking business remains in a funk. It is trying to cut costs, but the drop in revenue is outpacing the decrease in costs.

Sedo’s domain business has shed quite a few employees. It ended Q1 with 138 employees, down 15 from the end of the year. At this time last year it had 170 employees.

The domain segment revenue was down 14.1% compared to Q1 2012.

Sedo blames an overall flailing domain parking market and low cost rivals (e.g., domain parking companies that give a higher revenue share to customers) for its challenges.

Google’s spam page claims parked domains are web spam.

Here’s something interesting to start your week.

Google has a page about “Fighting Spam” referring to pages designed to trick search engines such as cloaking and hidden text.

Listed right there underneath “Types of Spam” is this:

It’s completely understandable that Google doesn’t want to index parked domains. But to label them as spam? I take two issues with that.

1. In order to be web spam, the creator of the page should be trying to game Google to get the page indexed. Domain parkers don’t do that. They used to, but now we know our pages aren’t going to show up in Google, and there’s nothing the big players are doing to parked pages to try to circumvent that.

2. If a parked page is inherently spam, then Google powers a big chunk of spam. It’s Google ads that power over half of parked domains.

(Thanks Joe Politzer)

Internet Traffic asks customers to identify themselves as part of new Google initiative.

One of the topics discussed extensively in the hallways at Webfest this year was changes Google is making to its parking program.

Although I don’t have all of the details, the bottom line is that Google is making an effort to better identify who is actually parking domains using its ad feed. This may involve steps to identify people across the various parking companies that use Google.

Today Internet Traffic customers saw what appears to be the first sign of these changes.

The company sent an email to customers asking them to agree to a couple terms and provide detailed contact information.

The terms are basic and are already in all parking companies’ terms: that you won’t click on ads on any of your domains and won’t provide incentives for others to click.

I’m not sure how this will be implemented across the different parking companies, but you can expect to see some of the results of these changes in the coming months. And my understanding is that there are other parts of this initiative that you won’t see.

Sedo’s domain parking business continues to drag on overall company. Sales of domains are down, too.

Sedo Holding released its Annual Report yesterday (pdf), and the numbers for the domain name business are fairly dismal.

Sedo Holding has two parts: domain marketing (Sedo) and affiliate marketing (affilinet).

First, the good news: Affilinet saw its revenue grow 17.7% year-over-year.

Now, the bad news: The bad news: Sales at Sedo in 2012 droped 17.9%.

Revenue from the domain marketing business totaled € 31.7 million in 2012 compared to € 38.6 million in 2011.

The decline in revenue can be attributed to the company’s domain parking business, which saw the number of parked domains on its platform fall from 4.4 million at the end of 2011 to 3.8 million at the end of last year.

The good news — at least for Sedo — is that the domain trading segment (i.e. name selling) saw slight sales revenue growth. The bad news for the overall domain market is that the revenue growth was due solely to higher commissions. Sedo’s domain sales actually dropped from $84.4M in 2011 to $68.2M in 2012.

In its annual report, Sedo says it sees the trend toward weaker results in the domain marketing business continuing in 2013. It is taking a number of steps, including “adjusting our existing structures”, to continue to run the business profitably.

Sedo’s market cap was cut in half in 2012, ending the year at € 41.7 million.

InternetTraffic selected as top domain parking company.

Less than two years after opening his own domain parking platform, domain investor Frank Schilling is at the top of the heap.

Participants in Domain Name Wire’s 8th annual industry survey have selected InternetTraffic as the top domain parking service.

Data show that the domain parking business is still fragmented. InternetTraffic received 22% of the vote but seven companies received at least 6%.

Here are the top parking companies according to the survey:

1. InternetTraffic 22%
2. Sedo 17%
3. Voodoo 8%
4. Bodis, Rook, GoDaddy, SmartName (6%, tie)

Domain owners continue to report relatively low RPMs on their parked domains.

38% reported earning less than $10 per 1,000 page views in 2012:

42% of respondents said their domain parking revenue was down in 2012 compared to the prior year, with 15% reporting a drop of at least half.

29% reported an increase while 28% said it was flat.

Domainers aren’t bullish about 2013, either. 34% think parking revenue will go down while only 24% predict an improvement.