February Was Tough Month for Domain Name Parking Firms

TrafficClub, Afternic hit setbacks in domain name parking.

I usually start each month by giving my results for domain parking for the previous month. This will be difficult for February’s results.

First, TrafficClub lost its DomainSponsor and Google Adsense for Domains channels. TrafficClub automatically optimizes your domains across various parking programs. Now all of my domains are only being sent to Skenzo. Although this defeats the general purpose of TrafficClub, TrafficClub does still provide access to Skenzo. Skenzo requires 1,000,000 uniques per month and would not accept my portfolio for its program. You can expect TrafficClub to ad other partners in the near future.

TrafficClub’s loss of the DomainSponsor set off a PR battle between TrafficClub and DomainSponsor. DomainSponsor claims it had to end the relationship due to changes by Google (which provides the advertising feed for DomainSponsor). Still, DomainSponsor then contacted people right now using TrafficClub to encourage them to move their domains directly to DomainSponsor.

TrafficClub CEO Monte Cahn wrote on DNForum regarding DomainSponsor’s move to contact its clients:

As some of you may know, Google decided to make some sweeping changes with their partners regarding 3rd and 4th party feeds. TrafficClub.com was unique as it allowed multiple feeds to compete on a domain by domain basis and select not only the feed but the landing pages that monetized the best for each domain.

DomainSponsor/Oversee was one of 3 Google feed in TrafficClub and WAS considered a partner until yesterday when they decided to do whois look ups and aggregate all contact information they had on TC clients on every domain name and directly solicit our clients. In my opinion and following a direct conversation with their management (following I was even solicited), their intent was to take advantage of the situation and steal our clients. They were actually planning this for days.

Sometimes it takes a while to discover the true colors of firms and their management.

The great news is that they flushed themselves out of the system and revenue and performance will increase as a result. TrafficClub will only get better when we learn from experiences such as these.

My advice is to choose your partners carefully and work with people/firms you can really trust and who are aligned with with you. If you never learn from your mistakes, you will never grow. We just learned from ours.

Things always happen for a reason!

DomainSponsor’s Ron Sheridan defended the firm’s action:

Yesterday we sent out an e-mail inviting TrafficClub clients to deal directly with DomainSponsor.

We would like to apologize if our email notification appeared as “spam”. We were attempting to reach out to clients who were enjoying our DomainSponsor program via TrafficClub. We felt we had good reason and justification to do so but the email did not speak to the reason we were forced to send it. The email was created and sent in haste and failed to give the larger context.

Background: On mid day Friday we were notified by our largest upstream PPC provider that we were to immediately terminate our participation in TrafficClub. We quickly notified TC and apprised them of the situation. TC asked for more time which seemed reasonable. While we were not given more time on our end, we decided to extend the deadline to Wednesday (yesterday) midnight and absorb any financial and legal risks ourselves.

We were expecting an notice by TC to those clients affected. As of 5:00pm pst on Wednesday no notice seemed forthcoming, and we saw that as a direct reflection on us. We decided it was necessary to send an notice on our own. We have been very happy with our relationship with TC and it is with great sadness that we had to terminate it. This was not a DS decision or a TC decision…it was something forced upon us.

We think this development which precipitated our email, is part of a larger effort from the sizable upstream providers to exert more control over their distribution. In that context, our main concern is to ensure we abide by our terms of service thus ensuring our clients the most sustainable and highest performing experience. That stated we could have and ought to have handled the specific communication better, and we apologize to those directly impacted especially the TrafficClub team. We welcome anyone who has concerns to contact us directly and discuss with us.

In the words of the great Paul Harvey, “Now you know the rest of the story”.

We’ll see how this plays out over the coming weeks.

TrafficClub and DomainSponsor weren’t the only parking firms to experience turbulence recently. Afternic, a NameMedia firm, is experiencing note difficulties with its Active Audience feed. In a public apology to its clients, Afternic’s Michael Collins wrote:

Many members have by now noticed that our parking reporting has been down much of this month. Notes that are posted show poor revenue for many domains since of problems we experienced in a recent change to a fresh feed provider. I apologize to all members for this problem. We are working diligently to fix the problems quickly. Furthermore, we plan to credit members’ accounts to restore revenue that was lost due to these transition problems.

Our feed provider change along with improved parking technology that we now have as a part of NameMedia will enable us to improve click rate and rev share once these problems are fixed. We are also confident that this transition to a fresh feed provider will increase members’ income significantly going forward. I hope that you will be patient and allow us to prove ourselves as a great parking service to our members.

These difficulties and changes in the domain parking industry show that there are risks in domain names. Domain name owners can’t count on consistent revenue from their domain names and need to spread risk across a number of platforms and monetiziation strategies.