Above.com Optimizes Domain Parking Revenue
Above.com optimizes your domain parking revenue.
A lot of people are complaining regarding falling domain parking revenues. To counteract the drop, they’re turning to domain development. But there’s a simpler solution: optimizing your current parking revenue.
I’ve been testing Above.com, a domain parking optimization service, for the past couple weeks. It does as advertised: optimizes your domains across parking firms to maximize revenue.
Above.com is a free service from Trellian, a keyword research firm. It makes money from referral fees to parking firms and also plans to offer a paid version in the future.
To start, you link your parking accounts to Above.com. (Regarding ten parking firms are supported, counting many of the ones on ParkingJudge). Then you input your domains and change to the Above.com nameservers. The service kicks in, split testing your traffic across your preferred parking firms, ultimately pointing the domain to the firm that provides the most revenue.
There are a couple other perks to Above.com beyond just maximizing revenue. First, it allows you to see all of your parking stats in one central location, rather than logging in to each account. Second, Above.com uses its nameservers’ traffic logs to compare to your parking firm’s stats. This is notable since all parking firms note visits differently. This means the RPM (revenue per thousand) they note can’t be easily compared to another parking firm. Now you can see how many visitors actually visited the domain and calculate a true RPM for each firm.
It’s difficult to understand exactly how Above.com tests traffic, and additional variants (such as country breakdown) would be a nice addition.
But Above.com is a nice improvement over the old method of split testing traffic, which was usually to use parking aggregators such as TrafficClub. Parking ad feed providers frowned on these services, which aggregated all of your revenue and paid you directly (keeping a cut for themselves).
Although Above.com leaves keyword optimization and domain-by-domain optimization up to you, it’s a great service for testing domains across multiple parking firms.
