Fraudulent Traffic

[Donny Simonton]

We are currently working with Yahoo on the conversion ratio and fraud level on some accounts on Parked.com. If you have not been paid yet, it is probably because your account was flagged by either us or Yahoo to be investigated. But I recommend that you contact your account manager and they can let you know for sure.

In the next day or so our investigation will be completed, at that time if your traffic is deemed worthless/bot based or pure crap, we will ask you to send it elsewhere and you will not be paid. With new rules sent down by Yahoo your domains may be banned from all Yahoo partners. So your choice will be to use a Google partner or buy new domains.

If your account was flagged without good reason you will be paid in full. For those of you that were paid, and your trafffic is deemed to be crap, we will be sending people to get our money back.

If you have a 0% conversion rate, you will find out tomorrow when I close your account, your brothers accounts, and your sisters accounts as well.

For the rest of the normal domainers who just want to make some money, if your quality is good according to Yahoo, you will be getting a raise tomorrow.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Donny
Parked.com

[jdk]

For those of you that were paid, and your trafffic is deemed to be crap, we will be sending people to get our money back.

I'm not a member of Parked.com, but I found this sentence kind of amuzing.

I guess those who have been asking about payment have an answer why they were not paid.

[DNjet]

Well, if someone has crap traffic to just one domain ,do you close the entire account? I mean some domainers here buy/sell weekly and park domains aquired sometimes in bulk, how is a person supposed to know where traffic comes from to a particular domain aquired in a recent purchase of a bulk lot or a drop list? I don't believe I have a problem, but would like to know how you are going about this matter in case it ever does come up.

[Donny Simonton]

It's if you have crap traffic to the entire account. Imagine 5,000 clicks in one week and not a single person made it to the signup page or bought something. That account was one I shut down earlier today. That was across 30 domains.

Now if you have 1 domain in an account with the same ratio, that will be shut down as well.

Donny

[DomainEngineer]

make perfect sense........domainers must weed out the crap or ppc industry will suffer.

Thanks.

[DomainFatigue]

For those of you that were paid, and your trafffic is deemed to be crap, we will be sending people to get our money back.

Vito insurance: "Vito, go get our money back!"

[Duckinla]

I'm just curious about the crap traffic. Is this something that implies fraud on the part of the domainer, or is it something beyond the domainers control that can happen naturally?

[jdk]

It happens naturally, and fraud is a strong word for it. Obviously cancelling one's account over it is a bit outrageous when the revenue can be removed and domain asked to be removed from one's account.

A lot of programs state this kind of traffic as "fraudulent" and cancel accounts. IMHO f--- them for their stupidity. (Speaking in general, have never used Parked.com so I can not comment on them). Don seems like a rather nice guy.

These programs need to know when someone joins they are not going to transfer over all their domains. Rather they are going to test you out with a few mediocre domains to see the results. If one is going to cancel your account because 5 domains do not convert and that is all you have parked with them... I'll leave the rest to you.

[Duckinla]

Thanks JDK, that's what I was afraid of. Seems a little odd to throw the responsibility back onto the domainers. I thought the domainers real job was to bring in the traffic. I thought the rest was between the parking company, the advertising provider and the advertisers.

I'm not at Parked.com, but are they really going to withhold past revenues for something other than fraud? Can a domainer even know the conversion rate of their clicks?
I can't imagine Yahoo or the advertisers could withhold revenues, but I could be wrong.

[Donny Simonton]

Here's how this works. If you send me or any advertiser legitimate traffic you will be paid. If you send them bot traffic, turkish porn pop-under traffic, or requiring people to click out before they can join your site traffic you won't be paid. If your traffic never converts then the advertisers don't want your traffic, if they don't want it then I can't accept it either.

I'll post some good examples of fraud in a little while.

Donny

[wolfis.com]

...and every half way honest and smart domainer will send domain traffic the does not convert with any one specific ppc service to someplace else until he/she finds a service that makes him/her money - this is just common business sence. ( i , for example move approx. 800 names to parked and found after ca. 10 days that some of them do not bring as much income as somewhere else - so i moved them - on the other hand some of the names convert nicley - so there is no reason to move them (unless parked.com tells me otherwise) - i do this with a lot of names at several ppc services to find the best suitable place for each of the domains and it also makes the most money for the ppc services - its a win win situation as long as both parties ( ppc and domainer ) are fair and honest with each other.


its nothing personal - its just business !

[Donny Simonton]

Wolfis you are 100% correct. I would never terminate myself if I were playing by the rules even if I were bending them. But I would terminate myself if I were breaking the rules.

Before we launched we told all of our employees across our different companies to try out Parked.com and let us know what they thought, well we had about 100 customers in 48 hours. Employees, parents, siblings, neighbors, and even ex-employees. That is when we noticed something strange, one of our ex-employees who added 5 domains added about 5 more. We looked at the first 5 and each was making about $15 a day, no big deal except that the domain were registered the day before. And each one was getting the same number of hits and the same number of clicks. They did a good job of hiding their ip address, except they forgot to change their user agent, which had their nickname in it. Oops.

This is a business, I want to pay everybody here a lot of money, whether you use me now or 2 years from now, I will always be fair and honest with everybody. Just don't try to steal from me.

This is an example of fraud, that I just shut down 30 seconds ago. Person A signs up 2 weeks ago. No domains ever added. Today they add 1 domain, the domain clicks a click within 5 minutes of being added. Then everytime afterwards it gets at least a click a minute, random ip addresses and no referrers. It's almost perfect if you wanted to cheat, except they forgot to change the user agent. Come on guys, if you are going to cheat don't be a bunch of idiots and make it easy!

903 clicks over $2,500 would have been his cut down the drain. Oh well.

If you do this, I will ban you.

Donny

[Duckinla]

Well that makes sense. I was worried you were talking about issues beyond the domainers control. Like buying/registering a domain and not knowing where the traffic is coming from.

[joy3g]

Some do not support the region in support of the traffic, which is parked.com's mistake, you must be responsible for your mistakes, rather than suspended account here to distinguish between malicious acts and acts normal, because I had some traffic on the good, although popular support yahoo, but the problem is your system

[kylon]

hi nice to meet i heard all about parked what to know is what kinda of traffic do u want and where can i get this traffic because i dont wanna be deleted all this means alot to me so i just want to hear wht u have to say and if theres any changes i can make tht u want me to make i will

[goodyork]

Well that makes sense. I was worried you were talking about issues beyond the domainers control. Like buying/registering a domain and not knowing where the traffic is coming from.

Hi, Donny

I have to worry this too......
I 100% support you suspend who made fraudulent traffic , but what's the definition ? Perhaps you mixed up the fraudulent traffic and the low quality traffic here..
If you don't like low quality traffic from certain regions, you can easy block them from your system, or you can ignore them from your system , many company do this , like sedo , namedrive or others. Or you can request the domainer remove them from your system.
As the domainer , we can only select which company we parked our domain , but we can not control where the traffic from or other things like conversion ratio. You select suspend the entire account by an ambiguous reason , it's really oddity......

[typeins]

Guys he isnt talking about you sending domains which dont happen to have 100% US traffic blah blah..

He is simply saying people that try and defraud the company by using bots, clicking their own links etc.. will be banned.

Nothing new, they all deserve to be banned.

[Donny Simonton]

I guess I did combine two things but when you get down to it basically both are the same.

If you have somebody who is using a bot to click out, no matter if it's a dumb bot or a smart bot, it's still automated clicks by a bot.

If you send 100 clicks and none of them convert on the advertiser end is that crappy traffic or fraudulent clicks. It's sometimes hard to tell with only 100 clicks, but if you have 1000 clicks and not a single one converts is that crappy traffic or fraudulent clicks?

The average according to my sources is 40% converts. I thought those numbers were insane so I asked to have my personal account checked and one of my coworkers checked as well. My personal account converted last week at 54% and my coworker who we all say has the crappiest domains in the world was converting at 37%.

So if you convert at 0% with a decent amount of clicks, (whatever that number may be), I can guarantee you won't be using parked.com for long. Just as an FYI, I have not shutdown anybody with 1%.

And this is across the board, so it's a combination of all of your traffic, not just one domain or not just one country.

Donny

[9888]

Hi Donny

Is there anyway we can see what our "converts" percentage is in our own account.

If not could you possibly PM me my converts?

This seems to be the key for all PPC parking, but is something that seems to be kept secret from the domaineer.

Cheers.

[dntalk]

What's the rule of converted ratio? have activities on the site? just stay for seconds?

The rule shall be public and checked. Or it's not fair to domainers.