Domain Name Wire » Domain Parking

HostExploit says Oversee.net is improving, making a case study

Andrew Allemann — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:18:15 +0000

HostExploit applauds Oversee.net for fixing problems that landed it at top spot at recent “Bad Hosts” list.

HostExploit, a group that compiles a list of what it calls “Bad Hosts”, no longer lists Oversee.net as the #1 bad host.

In its fourth quarter report, the group says Oversee.net is now ranked as the #12 bad host.

Why? It’s kind of hard to tell. Last quarter I reached out to both Oversee.net and HostExploit about the ranking. I heard back from neither so I guess I’m on my own to interpret the results.

But HostExploit applauds Oversee.net in its latest report, stating:

For a responsible host, the shock of finding they are ranked unusually high, or even worse in the #1 position, can be enough to prompt immediate remedial action.

Take, for example, the Q3 2011 #1 overall Bad Host (#1 for both Badware and Infected sites) AS33626 Oversee.net. This customer oriented reseller swiftly investigated the causes behind its undesired status. The introduction of a clean-up program and new procedures promptly reversed the trend. (More on this in a future case study.)

The clean-up for Oversee.net progresses with an added confidence that their high ranking will drop further and take them off the #1 spot for badware.

Indeed, Oversee.net is still ranked #1 for badware. But the report notes that it continues to work on negating false positives for badware on parked domains. (Oversee.net is parent company of domain parking company DomainSponsor.)

Sedo is also on the overall “bad” list at #39. Google is ranked #43.

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IAC sells Sendori for $3 million

Andrew Allemann — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:49:28 +0000

IAC’s sponsored listing/traffic monetization unit sold.

IAC has sold its Sendori unit for a total consideration of $3 million, nearly three years after buying the company, according to a recent SEC filing.

When Sendori launched, it provided a way for domain name owners to monetize their domain names without requiring domain visitor to click on ads. Instead, domain visitors are automatically forwarded to relevant advertisers’ sites.

Sendori’s consumer facing web site now promotes a tool that edits your computer’s DNS and says it will save you from phishing, malware, and other vulnerabilities. However, a number of domain parking companies still work with Sendori for so-called “zero click” monetization.

IAC purchased Sendori in January 2009 for an undisclosed price. Rumors pegged the purchase at $25 million, although the company said that was not accurate. Sendori was merged into Ask Sponsored Listings, which may be part of this sale.

An agreement to sell the company was reached on November 3 and was expected to close on or around November 10, according to the filing. The name of the buyer was not disclosed. The filing is from November, so an update should be provided in a future filing.

The filing shows Sendori’s revenue was $9.3 million in Q1 of this year. Q2 revenue fell to $7.0 million and Q3 revenue was only $5.3 million. It had losses in five of the last seven quarters.

The company wrote down $4.9 million in capitalized software costs and took an intangible asset impairment charge of $0.6 million in Q3 in preparation for the sale.

$2.3 million of the $3.0 million purchase price is contingent on the collection of outstanding accounts receivable.

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Search spend to grow 15%-20% in 2012 but CPC down

Andrew Allemann — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:27:36 +0000

Rise of mobile has big affect on CPCs.

I just reviewed Efficient Frontier’s Q4 report for online advertising, which includes predictions for 2012.

The good news? The company predicts search spend will increase 15%-20% in 2012. On the downside for domain parkers, CPC will decrease 4% on top of 5% Quarter-over-quarter that they reported in Q4.

To be fair, this isn’t an across the board drop in CPC. A lot of it is attributed to an increase in mobile ad clicks, which currently cost less.

Here’s some other interesting data.

Mobile ads are exploding. It’s 7%-8% of search spend right now, up from 2% a year ago. Efficient Frontier expects it to be a whopping 16-22% of all paid clicks by the end of 2012!

This includes tablets, which I think should be a separate category from mobile phone traffic.

Yahoo/Bing ROI tops Google. The combo continues to have a better return-on-click for advertisers, but needs to grow its base to attract advertisers.

Facebook is huge in online advertising. The company predicts it will account for 5% of all online ad spend by the end of the year. In Q4 it reached 2.7% of biddable online advertising spend.

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How to import your Parked account into DomainApps

Andrew Allemann — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:59:06 +0000

Manage your old Parked.com and WhyPark accounts in one interface.

Earlier this month WhyPark announced it was changing its name to DomainApps. The name change made since, especially since the company had been acquired by Parked.com a couple years ago. WhyPark is kind of a derogatory term to parking companies, after all.

But Parked.com clients were surprised to see Parked.com basically disappear yesterday.

Sure, the face of the company — Donny Simonton — had left. But now Parked is gone?

It’s gone, sort of. Parked customers can now manage and park their domains in the DomainApps interface.

After you login to DomainApps.com with your WhyPark credentials, you complete a multi-step transition process. Step two of the process is importing any domains that were part of your Parked account.

Don’t worry — all of your parking stats are migrated into the new account and you don’t lose anything.

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Apparently a lot of people have yet to switch to DNS parking

Andrew Allemann — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:06:10 +0000

Google will cut you off at the end of the year.

The “deadline” to change your domains parked on Google parking services from URL forwarding to DNS has passed, but apparently a lot of people haven’t made the switch yet.

Sedo sent an email out to customers this week encouraging them to comply with the changes. Apparently the final, drop dead deadline is January 1.

According to the email, Google tested not monetizing URL forwarded domains for three day in the middle of November. My guess is this brought to attention a lot of non-compliant domain traffic.

DNS parking has always been the encouraged method of domain parking. Some people who rotated their domain traffic between sites used URL parking, although the biggest rotation service (Above.com) recently shifted to a DNS forwarding system.

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Google tweaks algorithm to kick parked domains out of its index

Andrew Allemann — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:42:34 +0000

Algorithm change designed to push parked domains out of Google.com index.

Google released an update on new changes made to its algorithm today, and one of them is bad news for anyone who still manages to get their parked domain names in the search index.

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.

It used to be that many parking pages got indexed and this delivered a lot of extra traffic to domain owners beyond just type-in traffic and old links. Google has gotten smarter about this in recent years, and it looks like this latest move may be the nail in the coffin.

Although Google hasn’t disclosed how it determines that a page is parked, it’s not that hard to do. It could even do this based on a combination of page structure and nameservers.

Update: As you’ll see if you try it, if you type in an actual parked domain name to Google it will still show it. I suspect they have just heavily demoted them.

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It’s CyberMonday. How is your domain traffic?

Andrew Allemann — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:59:54 +0000

Traffic to product related domains should swell today.

Today is CyberMonday, a name coined by the National Retail Federation to promote online buying for the holiday season.

The idea is that everyone is back at work after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and that means they’ll do a lot of online shopping.

In 2006 comScore measured $610 million in online commerce on CyberMonday. Last year it measured over a billion dollars.

This means that your “product” domain name should see a surge in traffic and revenue. If you have product related domains, did you see a jump in traffic last year for CyberMonday? What does your traffic look like today?

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