The secret opportunity of targeted domain traffic
Tom McDonald comments on how Google and Yahoo! prefer not to have domainers as clients, but they do want their traffic through one of the aggregators, such as for example DomainSponsor, NameDrive, Parked.com, or Sedo.
Tom writes:
Now let’s look at the large ad networks out there; Google and Yahoo!. They’ve become fairly hostile towards individuals with a plain ‘ol parked page. Sure, it can be done if you’re large enough or if you go through an aggregator but for the folks with just a handful of domains, they’re making it tough. I wonder what is going to happen? I wonder what monster of an advertising facilitator is going to fill the gap? What do GOOG and Y! have to lose? Well, the little guy may very well turn into a big guy, but he’s already been chased away. And, this new monster company may woo other huge advertisers away form the two staples. It’s opening the door and I think the two biggies are going to be left with tremendous feelings of regret for having pissed on the [for now] little guys. I could be wrong but my guess is that AdBrite or some other soon to be monster stands to gain quite a bit from the policies imposed by the biggies.
So who could roll up this field and enter it successfully, who can tap the secret stream of “unwanted” traffic? In order to properly monetize several hundred thousands of ads, you need a broad range and number of active advertisers. As Michael Gilmour points out, AdCenter by Microsoft would be a candidate, but while I hear rumors that they are running trials with selected domain owners, they generally seem to not to want to associate with the domain investment industry. They’d rather monetize typo traffic via their IE default search page.
Who knows, maybe one of the domain rental companies will fill in the space, or maybe a new player will emerge…
I totally agree with some of your conclusions but I also believe that Microsoft is one of those companies that can move very quickly….the change in direction to the Internet proved that. I think that this combined with some of Google’s actions lately (stealing staff etc.) would make a highly competitive individual like Steve Balmer pretty open to a suggestions on how to stop the Google juggernaut.
I was also thinking on who else could possibly own this space outside of the technology industry. There are a number of candidates that I think I’ll give some more thought to.
[…] Tom McDonald comments on how Google and Yahoo! prefer not to have domainers as clients, but they do want their traffic through one of the aggregators, such as for example DomainSponsor, NameDrive, Parked.com, or Sedo. For the full Domain Editorial article, click here. […]
I am a domainer fortunately I have enough domains that I can monetize them through parking services that require a minimum amount of domains ora certain quality but I would love to be able to host ads on my own server with out having to go through parking sites like the ones mentioned above, I would love to not only see a company step up that can offer the quality ads that google and yahoo offer with out the restrictions and a higher % of the adrevenue would also be great I think it would be a great start for a company if they offered higher splits on the adrevenue word would spread pretty fast through the domaining community and the webmaster community and that alone is a huge chunk of both google and yahoos revenue