Is DS stealing traffic?

[dmyre]

If you search for the term "online photo albums" on Domain Sponsor, you will be redirected to a website owned by Oversee.net. The website you are taken to is Livedigital.com. This has been duplicated on a few DS landing pages.

Does anyone know if this traffic is compensated, or merely "stolen"?

[March2005]

-

[NameYourself]

This is normal. They pay you on a "per click" basis for the traffic for keywords that they send to their own sites. They have also told me that they only use their sites for the keywords when it generates more for you than just standard pay per click results would. Obviously they could cheat because of this and because of the lack of details in the stats regarding the actual clicks and keywords, there is no way for you to actually know. I believe that generally this is making you more and that they are honest in the per click payouts. If you ask them, I am sure they would be able to disable it for you.

[dmyre]

Thanks for the explanation. I just haven't used DS in a while, and just discovered this issue...

[jimbaggs]

Its a case of the fox gaurding the henhouse. They do this on other high value terms too. mortgage and loan stuff goes straight to low.com, college stuff gets sent to degrees.com.

I wrote about this last year after I discovered that I was getting 26 cents for a "mortgage" visitor. In response they created an opt-out checkmark so you can turn these redirects off. My response was to begin the domainer's co-op.

The bottom line was that I signed up for PPC where my traffic would be presented with the highest bidding links and that wasn't what was being delivered. Without my prior knowledge my traffic was be redirected to DS's own referal engines at prices and terms that they themselves dictate. If I hadn't accidentally stumbled on it I never would have known.

DS says that you'll be paid competively but that seem true only if you fail to quantify the possibility that an average clicking visitor presented with a landing page populated with numerous high paying links will often click on more than one.

[jaydub]

Interesting ^^^^^

[RepCentral]

This practice would also seem to rebrand your site with the redirected name.
Say a person goes to "lowcostloans.com" and that directs to "loans.com".
There is a chance the visitor will notice and then head to "loans.com" (from a bookmark) in the future, completly stripping you of your future income.
I won't be listing any domains with companies that rebrand away from my domain name.

[GT Web]

This practice would also seem to rebrand your site with the redirected name.
Say a person goes to "lowcostloans.com" and that directs to "loans.com".
There is a chance the visitor will notice and then head to "loans.com" (from a bookmark) in the future, completly stripping you of your future income.
I won't be listing any domains with companies that rebrand away from my domain name.

right, because everyone bookmarks a parked page.

[denny007]

right, because everyone bookmarks a parked page.

Exactly my thought

[David G]

Anyone know why oversee.net is so intersted in so many domain where they become a major visitor to the sites as seen in log stats (non-domain sponsor url's).

They are one of the most active website visitors out there to lots of diverse sites and also very mysterious as to why they are so interested. I have emailed them asking about it with no replies.

[March2005]

maybe it is the information.com search engine bot