As Dan Kimball shared with me, one way that this product will be offered is a co-branded solution through parking and domain name registration companies. The platform connects to different registrars, marketplaces and parking providers (eNom, register.com, NetworkSolutions, tucows, EuroDNS, NameCheap, TDNAM, Afternic, Sedo and Domainsponsor) and diplayes the informaiton about your entire portfolio in one location.

I imagine that the registrars and parking companies will try to limit their offerings to their own, especially if they are going to give their product to their customer base for free. However you can often prove that you are the best by enabling your clients to compare.

Another question remains if domainers trust others with their sensitive data. ModernGigabyte has lots of experience in keeping data safe and private and has put a lot of that knowledge into this product, but some domainers might still prefer to handle this data in-house.

I for one think that this is just the first of many new tools that will help domainers manage their portfolios in a more automated fashion, which in turn will allow all of us to spend more time on sustaining and improving our businesses.
Find out more about the new product by visiting the Product Tour – you can also apply to be one of the 100 beta testers.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Demand Media, Inc., the next-generation social media company, today announced its acquisition of ExpertVillage.com, the premier Internet source for professional “how-to” videos filmed and produced by local filmmakers that feature experts on a broad range of topics. The acquisition significantly expands Demand Media’s social media platform with a growing library of diverse video content to be distributed across its network of niche social media web properties and available for users to integrate into their Channelme.tv video sites.

Launched with video in 2006, ExpertVillage is a highly trafficked video portal for how-to information and the largest provider of “made for the Internet” video content. This content was created through ExpertVillage’s proprietary process wherein filmmakers select specific how-to topics and produce videos on that subject matter. The filmmaker engages an expert on the selected topic and produces approximately 15 short how-to videos.

[...]

“We intend on increasing the scale of ExpertVillage’s existing business and expanding into new content areas,” said Demand Media co-founder and CEO, Richard Rosenblatt. “While we have enhanced our media properties through textual, photographic and social media content, we were seeking a video solution that could be integrated into our platform. ExpertVillage’s video solution and its network of filmmakers epitomize our approach to new media and our scale will provide their filmmakers with substantially more topics to develop. We are anxious to begin working together as one company.”

[full Press Release]

Tommy Hanson, Efficient Frontier’s Director of Partner Relations:

“Our clients’ conversion rates with domain ads are double their conversion rates on search. Domain park sites generally convert at a rate of over 5%, while search and content conversion rates are at about half that.” Furthermore, Efficient Frontier’s clients are paying for cost-per-clicks that are equal to that on search for conversions that are coming in at twice the rate. “When we analyzed the results, we were shocked. We didn’t expect to see that domain park sites can bring in the quality of traffic necessary to result in twice the conversion rates, at a cost-per-click that’s equal to that on search.”
Finally there is some public statistical data on the conversion of domain parking ads. You can read the full story here (PDF). Interesting that the sidebar mentions that Adsense for Domains is part of the Google content network, which I don’t think is the case.

[Thanks Mathias]

Last night Yahoo, our primary search provider, announced to all of their advertisers and partners that they would be implementing a “quality based pricing” system starting immediately in the United States and Canada.

“…quality-based pricing is designed to adjust advertiser pricing based on the quality of traffic coming from our distribution network. Traffic is intended to be priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality delivered to advertisers, based on conversion rates and other proprietary factors.

To assist you in better understanding the level of your traffic quality, we plan to provide you with a Traffic Quality (TQ) score for each of your implementations. TQ scores should be included in your partner reports and communicated as a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating.

By pricing traffic commensurate with quality, we believe that we will deliver higher value to our advertisers, thus strengthening our marketplace and driving up monetization for our partners.”

This is how the “quality based pricing” system will work at Parked.com. A person comes to one of your domains parked with us, they search and click out to an advertiser, Yahoo will look to see what your traffic quality score is and let’s say you are an 8. The advertiser will be charged whatever an 8 is worth, if the click was originally $1.00, I was told that the click would be at least $0.80 but it could be much higher.

We will provide you with your traffic quality score once we receive it today, the TQ scores are supposed to be updated every 2 weeks. Over the next few weeks as we learn how the TQ scores are calculated we should be able to provide a little better guidance on how to increase your scores. If you feel that your score is too low, we should be able to work with you to see how we can improve your score.

Over the next 10 days Yahoo will continue to make improvements to the new system. We do not have any news on when any other countries will be added to the quality based pricing system. One last thing is that this will affect all parking companies that are using Yahoo, not just Parked.com.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager [...] if you have any questions.

In the end this should hopefully increase payouts for high-quality traffic domains. Also this might actually give domain investors an indicator as to which domains perform best for the advertisers and where the targeting needs to be improved.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts… and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

Right now, I have only heard from those doing either “Made for AdSense” style of sites or those doing arbitrage, and it does include publishers making significant money per month ($10,000 USD and higher). So they are not giving a pass to those who are earning above a certain threshold. And it seems that no one who is outside of the arbitrage/MFA area of AdSense earnings has been affected thus far.

And good news is that Google will be paying out earnings to those publishers, so they do not need to worry that they will lose any income earned thus far.

At this point I don’t know if this is affecting Adsense for Domains (the parking feed for many domain traffic aggregators) as well, however it would coincide nicely with the shut down of some newer parking companies that might have had some problems keeping “junk” traffic out of their networks.

[via JenSense]

ParkedNames issued this short statement: “Yahoo! and Google do not see the value in domain traffic and are making a slow but certain move away from supporting domain monetization.” If you consider the termination of Klickerz by Skenzo (which mainly uses a Google feed) and the earlier split between DomainSponsor and TrafficClub (TrafficClub was sharing DomainSponsor’s feed), this might just be a sign of the times to come (the cold war against domain traffic).

A quote from the Bloomberg article on the possible purchase of Yahoo!:

“It’s all about the battle for the advertisement market. Who will be the dominant force on the Internet,” said Wim Zwanenburg, who helps oversee 27 billion Euros at Bank Degroof Group, including Microsoft shares. “Microsoft won’t be able to catch up with Google on its own. If you want to play a role, you’ll have to gain market share and conquer a position.”

So if the advertising market is all that matters, why neglect the value of domain traffic, direct navigation or direct search (whatever you want to call it)? Do we really want trademark-infringements and badly executed arbitrage to drag down our entire industry? While domainers might be used to working “underground” in the past, the time has come to show that this is a legitimate industry which already provides tremendous value to the search, internet and advertising market today. Do we want to gamble on the possibility that the power of our traffic is strong enough to validate and secure our existence, or should we join forces (for example in the Internet Commerce Association) to create a common voice that speaks for all of us?

[via SevenMile]

Los Angeles, CA (May 1, 2007) — DomainSponsor, Oversee.net’s domain monetization business and organizing party of DOMAINfest Amsterdam, today announced that it had partnered with NICIT, a leader in the German-speaking aftermarket, to bring attendees the finest quality domain names for bidding in a live auction setting. DOMAINfest Amsterdam is a two-day regional seminar and networking event created specifically to respond to the needs of domainers operating in the European business environment. The event will be held May 16-17, 2007 at the Hilton Amsterdam Hotel.

High value domains will be auctioned in a premium live auction on site in Amsterdam. The balance of the names will be offered through NICIT’s online auction site. Participants in the auction can submit domains, pre-bid on the auction and bid during the live auction. The auction will take place on May 17, 2007 at 5:00 p.m. (Central European Time). To get more details on how to participate, go to the NICIT/DOMAINfest Auction site (http://nicit.com/domainfest).

“Hosting an auction with NICIT adds a new dimension to DOMAINfest Amsterdam,” said Ron Sheridan, Director of Business Development for DomainSponsor. “This will truly be a global auction with an array of TLDs being offered. Our objective is to make this relevant to a broader domain buying audience. It is a natural evolution of DOMAINfest as we strive to offer more to the domainer community, and establish this event as the premier conference and marketplace for the domain industry.”

To register or to get more information on DOMAINfest Amsterdam, visit http://www.domainfest.com or e-mail info@domainfest.com.