Latest DS announcement: Good or Bad?

[anony]

Hi,

Let me first make it clear that I have been with DS for over 2 months and I am quite satisfied. My portfolio daily revenue fluctuates generally 50% above or below the average (which sometimes scare me), but I am happy with the overall average and kind of hoping that it will keep going up with DS optimization and system improvements in future.

Today was a kind of un-usually slow day for 'visitors (both US and non-US)' as well as 'revenue' and I kind of kept wondering why is it it so when its not even a holiday here in USA.

I just logged into my DS account and saw this announcement which kind of scared me because now I am thinking may be my visitors/revenue was slow today because of these new changes? I hope I am wrong but still I can't help wonder if it is so.

My traffic quality is very high: 70% is US traffic, 10% is Canadian, 10% European, 5% SouthAmerica, and may be rest 5% is from Asia.

Please take a look at the announcement below and let me know what they mean by this whole thing. I think they may just filter out your non-USA traffic to most extent and it may reduce our revenue by 10-15% (in my case as I don't have too much non-USA traffic) or may be by a higher % if you have high % of non-USA traffic.

But again, I may be just reading too much in to it. So please express what you think of this announcement and if you think it is going to reduce your revenue:

ANNOUNCEMENT:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2004
New DomainSponsor Landing Pages


As many of you can attest by the revenue increases you have seen over this past year, we are unwaveringly committed to providing the highest revenues and payouts in the industry. This has always been, and continues to be our main focus and dedication of resources. This is necessary as both a proactive measure to reward our publishers and as a reactive measure toward performance measurements being implemented across the industry. Most recently, our upstream partners have been tightening standards and increasing measure of traffic quality. As a response to this, (as many of you may have noticed), as of 12:00pm today, we have been testing some new landing page designs.

The effects of this testing may not be evident in the short term, but the long term effects will be invaluable.

What this means to you


You should not see your overall revenues affected by these changes. In the long run, by increasing traffic quality, we will be able to leverage higher click values from our ppc partners which will be passed onto you, resulting in increased revenues. In addition, we can encourage growth in our industry by encouraging new advertisers into the ppc space and more competitive bidding by existing advertisers.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for all the opinions.

PS: Can anyone provide a sample of new landing page designs?

Regards,

[fatter]

My DS portfolio was down in USA traffic only, the sites i tested all gave me an error message so probably more the testing of new system caused down time on usa traffic, my overseas traffic was fine

[cyphix]

I'm a little wary of this annoucement too.. especially this part..

Most recently, our upstream partners have been tightening standards and increasing measure of traffic quality

That usually means we're going to take a pay cut, no!?

[adill420]

that is scary! I hope they won't do anything about international traffic..i have been putting some serious effort and $$

lets see what DS has to say..

[ShaunP]

I'm a little wary of this annoucement too.. especially this part..

Most recently, our upstream partners have been tightening standards and increasing measure of traffic quality

That usually means we're going to take a pay cut, no!?

cyphix .. I think they mean that good converting traffic will be rewarded more and crap traffic will not do as well. IMO

Shaun

[anony]

Yesterday was not a good day for visitors and revenue as compared to other days and especially compared to previous Thursdays.

Visitors were down 15 - 20% and revenue was down 20 - 30%.

And most of my traffic is from US as mentioned above.

I really hope that DS representative post here and put our worries to rest that this unusual huge drop in visitors/revenue is not because of their new landing page designs.

Also they can use this thread as feedback on their new page designs.

Thanks,

[DomainEngineer]

Q: Will all the 'previously optimized' domains become non-optimized and will have to re-optimize again because of the newly designed landing pages?

Thanks,

[hiOsilver]

Q: Will all the 'previously optimized' domains become non-optimized and will have to re-optimize again because of the newly designed landing pages?

Thanks,

Rick,

I have checked a number of my domains, and it looks like they are working their way to restore the optimization. However, the optimization is for categories, and the one-click links appear to be gone. Frankly, DS had thrown relevance to the wind on the one-click links, so I am not sorry to see those disappear. Knowing the way things work at DS, these new style pages will probably generate more income. DS usually experiments for a while on a few accounts to determine if page layout changes are likely to increase payouts.

[msong]

Hey guys. Let me do what I can to answer all of your questions and address all of your concerns about the announcement posted yesterday on domainsponsor.com.

First of all, it seems some of you are reading too much into this and worried for nothing. LOL

The purpose of the announcement was to better communicate our efforts to our publishers than we have in the past. What we are doing is no different than what we've been doing in the past, and continue to do - which is finding ways to increase revenues for publishers while driving high quality traffic to our ppc partners through optimization and targetting.

1. There is no reason a new landing page would have any effect on visitor counts. This includes both US and Non-US visitors. What changing the landing page does is affect the quantity and quality of searches and clicks (and consequently revenue) is generated on the landing pages. No changes have been made to the type of traffic we are accepting. Meaning what you have been paid for in the past, you will continue to be paid for.

2. Our actions are more of a preemptive measure to the increasing demands we have noticed from ppc partners for quality traffic. Our testing is intended to ensure that our payouts to our publishers will continue to be some of the highest in the industry.

3. Optimization data that we use to optimize your domains will remain intact with the new landing pages.

[Domain]

I'm considering domainsponsor.com but would like to see these new landing pages. Any examples yet?

[ParkQuick.com]

Zanex.com is an example. It once had clickable links on the front page directly to paid sites. Now it just has "searches" - which means that we don't get paid until click two.

This particular domain has always done better at Trafficz. I'm giving DS a chance with it for a month, but I'm not thrilled so far.

Len

[adill420]

unless i am wrong i see zanex.com completely as two clicks just as my other sites on ds

[TravelFastpitch]

I'm considering domainsponsor.com but would like to see these new landing pages. Any examples yet?

No need to consider, DS is by far the best paying domain monetization service around. It is not even close.

TopNames.com and Domainut will concur the same as well. It's time for you all to jump on the bandwagon. You will be glad you did/

[hiOsilver]

I'm considering domainsponsor.com but would like to see these new landing pages. Any examples yet?

http://www.cyclepro.com
http://www.newportmagazine.com

[cyphix]

They just look like portals to me hiOsilver.....

Well yesterdays revenue was fine, but todays revenue isn't looking very promising so far....

To tell you the truth, I'm not suprised seeing as how the new landing pages look.... exactly how are "portal pages" going to mke us more money? I mean, all the one click links are gone & now all the pages pretty much have portal pages... only difference from a portal page is basically they have the optimized categories up the top.... why not just havr optimized categories? What's the point of trying to confuse the user with too many links (aka a portal type page).

I know it's early, but I'm not happy with the new pages or my revenue so far.

[adill420]

same as before except before the main pages had direct link now they dont. Probably DS is working on something better?

As for those considering: DS is pretty much providing same ppc results as others. The question is why is DS better. Because the way the optimize each domain. And the best part? They strive hard to give the best payout solution to their publishers!

Hopefully that helps!

thanks

[anony]

I have spent some good amount of time analysing since Thursday when these new pages were introduced.

Here are the findings:

1. First day (Thursday stats):

Visitors: DOWN 15%,
Clicks: DOWN 8%,
Revenue: DOWN 21%

2. Second Day (Friday stats):

Visitors: UP 3%,
Clicks: DOWN 16%,
Revenue: DOWN 32%

3. Today so far (Saturday stats as of 10:15 AM EST):

Visitors: OK,
Clicks: OK,
Revenue: OK.

OK = almost same as it used to be on a Saturday.
----------------------------------------


Overall Impact and future prediction based on this limited 2.5 days data so far:

Visitors: Should be same as before.

Clicks or Click Rate: Should go down (up to 5%) as now visitors must click AT LEAST TWO times for you to get paid or that click to be considered.

Revenue: Should go down (up to 35 %) depending upon what kind of domains you have. If you own a lot of typos , you will lose the most as there are no one-click links any more and people will not keep clicking general links when they know they visited your site by mistake.

PS: Thats my read so far, but you never know what DS has up its sleeves as they are the best brains in this business and they must have thought about this especially the "similar looking or typo domains" issue. So if you lose a lot, so will they.
So I assume they must have tested this imapct and hopefully things will get better.

Thanks,

[cyphix]

Today is the first day for me that I have started noticing any real changes in revenue.... yesterday was fine.

[alldig]

Why can DomainSponsor make landing pages that look like overture's ? www.railroad.com for example. It's simple, attractive, targeted and professional. And I bet this converts EXTREMELY well! Would it be that hard for DS to make a landing page such as this? The owner of the domain could upload an image (with specific dimension limitations) of his/her choice and customize that top title on each landing page. Is this too much to ask? Here's another example: www.landlords.com

[stuff]

hitfarms landing page also looks nice, and it looks like its also conveting better then domainsponsor