The appalling state of PPC

[DropWizard.com]

I was looking at some stats today. This is how far it's sunk!

may15-june14 group of domains 2011 & 2007

2011

uniques 12520

Clicks 340 (4.25%)

Earnings $183.49

per unique 1.47¢

per click 53.97¢

2007

uniques 5684

clicks 1592 (almost 36%)

earnings $665.68

per unique 11.71¢

per click 41.81¢


Worst of it is although the traffic shows as more than double it's because I added quite a few domains to that group over the last few years.

[Daddys4]

where do you most people park there domains.

[jmcc]

There's been a major shift in parking patterns over the last few years. Whereas before the registrars and hosters would just park undeveloped domains on their own homepage or a holding page, many now use sedo's registar parking service or other PPC services to monetise their unused domains. I've just completed a survey of 493783 .co websites and so far, 46.75% of them are parked with PPC. The processing is still underway so that figure may increase slightly. The percentage of developed/unclassified .co websites in the survey is 15.28% and that percentage may fall. In general, ccTLDs tend to be somewhat better than the gTLDs but .co has a profile closer to that of a gTLD due to its promotion as a .com alternative. I'm not sure if the same registrar/hoster PPC parking page changes have hit .ca but as most of the larger hosters and registrars use this approach, it might explain some of the changes (apart from the revenue changes).

Regards...jmcc

[msn]

We expect our earnings to increase since changing providers.

Based on the early numbers it seems that sedo/BigJumbo/Skenzo/Bodis and the others have been skimming the cream for a long time.

[dmyre]

I just moved all of my remaining domains away from Parked.com today.
For some reason, my TQ score plummeted to .50 on a scale of 1-10.

I hope Parked.com are capable of recovering soon...

“When nobody has your back, you gotta move your back.”

[Gerry]

Get Thee to Bodis...

[Adam Dicker]

We expect our earnings to increase since changing providers.

Which provider have you switched to?

-=DCG=-

[jmcc]

I hope Parked.com are capable of recovering soon...

Frank Schilling's internettraffic.com has some interesting transfer patterns. Among those losing most domains to the internettraffic.com nameservers are dsredirection.com, above.com, sedoparking.com, hitfarm.com and parked.com. While many of the transfers appear to be type-ins, it is going to be a lot harder for the smaller PPC operators to cope with losing such high traffic domains. If they were making serious commission on those type-ins then losing them will affect their balance sheet.

Regards...jmcc

[Adam Dicker]

. If they were making serious commission on those type-ins then losing them will affect their balance sheet.

They will probably take more from those that are left, unfortunately.

-=DCG=-

[jaydub]

Sad but true.... and they never learn

They will probably take more from those that are left, unfortunately.

-=DCG=-

[msn]

Frank Schilling's internettraffic.com has some interesting transfer patterns. Among those losing most domains to the internettraffic.com nameservers are dsredirection.com, above.com, sedoparking.com, hitfarm.com and parked.com. While many of the transfers appear to be type-ins, it is going to be a lot harder for the smaller PPC operators to cope with losing such high traffic domains. If they were making serious commission on those type-ins then losing them will affect their balance sheet.

Regards...jmcc

Especially if one sees the before and after revenue for those domains.

Parked.com was the most fair of all providers that we had prior to moving, but some of the others were taking really the vast majority of the money for each click, hit, whatever.

[DropWizard.com]

There are two things that are really bothering me right now aside from the rev declines.

I know our parking provider filters traffic for "quality". However a group of domains I took that according to them generated around 100/day and sent to another affiliate all of a sudden were generating 700-1200/day and finished a full month with over 52k clicks. That's a hell of a lot of filtering from the 3k they were showing. I know there are countries they don't want but historically those have represented just a minor percentage (under 10%) of our traffic. How do you explain going from 3000 clicks to 52,000 clicks? I'm staggered by this. As they have the rest of our portfolio I'm lost as to what our real traffic is now.

I'm extremely bothered by the fact that during the recent decline 2007-11 there has been little or nothing done by the ppc companies to work with their systems or platforms. It's been obvious for a while that a new platform was needed to achieve increased results and that pressure was needed to keep Google from creaming the payments for it's own profit position. Instead hey have just sat comfortably skimming a very large chunk of the revenue and provided absolutely nothing new. Although I don't know the percentages of Frank's new service it is apparent that the domain owner is getting the minor percentage of the earnings of the traffic we generate. That needs to change.

Looking at those figures of a little over 1c/unique I used to sell JUNK traffic for better $$$$ than that a few years back. To be getting that kind of return when the other players are dividing up dollars is beyond belief.

[Spex]

I used to sell JUNK traffic for better $$$$ than that a few years back.

I've seen this term mentioned quite a bit by domainers. What exactly is selling (or buying) traffic? How does that work?

Btw, I'm just curious, I'm not interested in buying/selling traffic at all

[Acro]

Are these stats from Parked?

I still have a dozen of domains there. Those that were making peanuts, once moved to sedo started making dollars daily. A lot of domains also got banned while at Parked, thanks to Yahoo and their fascist mentality about tagging a rate of "quality" to domains and even TLDs. Yahoo systematically blacked out domains that it deemed adult, controversial, about guns/alcohol etc.

[jmcc]

How do you explain going from 3000 clicks to 52,000 clicks?

Not sure if I can but there is a possibility - the novelty factor. Ordinary PPC pages have specific templates and signatures that can easily be detected by search engine quality programs. The use of such programs would allow a search engine to keep its index relatively clean of PPC sites and push to organic sites to the top of the results. The problem for the SEs is when a new PPC operator gets into the market. It takes a while for the signatures to be established and for the new PPC pages to be classified as PPC. Having just spent the last few days working on a .co web survey, most of the time was spent on working out the "coming soon/holding page" signatures for various small hosters. However some of the larger PPC operators have easily detected PPC signatures.

I'm extremely bothered by the fact that during the recent decline 2007-11 there has been little or nothing done by the ppc companies to work with their systems or platforms.

Some of the PPC operators were a bit cannibalistic in that they were providing PPC services but were also engaged in domain tasting on their own behalf. Because the money kept rolling in, they did not have to innovate or develop. However with the link rot effect may now be reducing the traffic on the last of the tasted/reregistered domains, they are faced with a continuing loss of revenue. Some of these PPC companies also expanded during the bubble so they may be somewhat too large to survive in a tougher market.

It seems that PPC parking is now the defacto state of new domains. There is now a lot more competition for PPC revenue. The other interesting aspect is that the single biggest PPC operator in .co seems to be GoDaddy with its PPC parking pages. Sedoparking is there too but sedo's registrar/Hosting PPC parking service drives up the numbers of domains on PPC. A newly registered domain is more likely to go straight to a PPC parking page these days than be developed.

Regards...jmcc

[Raider]

I know our parking provider filters traffic for "quality".

You know how some unscrupulous Farmers hire workers to pick their crops?... The workers spend all day from dusk to dawn picking strawberries, their paid by the pound, but 3/4 of what they picked are not quite ripe by the Farmer standards, so the workers are only paid for a 1/4 of what they picked, while the Farmer sells ALL of what they picked.

TQ Scoring is nothing but a utility that's robs the little guy of legitimate traffic while increasing Yahoo's bottom line, no different than the unscrupulous Farmer.