WITHOUT PPC, HOW CAN A DOMAINER SURVIVE?
August 19th, 2009 Posted in Aftermarket, General Domain News, Parking ServicesHow does a domainer survive in today’s online ad climate? If not PPC, or aftermarket sale, do you have any other options?
I’m not saying I have the solid answers, but my first step when I realized PPC was dying 18 months ago was to assure my domains at least gain “recognition”. This is why I signed on at WhyPark.
I was dismayed in late 2008 and early 2009 that each portfolio I parked at three of the top PS’s (Parking Services) dropped from close to $1000 monthly to a little over $220 a month in less than a year. That’s an 80% drop in PPC revenue. In a year. I’ve heard over 100 stories as bad or worse than my own… so being the suspicious guy that I am, I decided something fishy is going on. I’m not an expert in fishing either, so I couldn’t provide answers, even after talking to the “fishing experts” so to speak.
For some strange reason (and people, you can check this out for yourselves on your own parked domains), my CTR has dropped from an avg of 15%-20% to below 5% at some PS’s. The only PS that didn’t drop in CTR or CPC significantly was Parked.com, but now I’ve seen the CTR and CPC drop there in the last three months.
Since transparency isn’t a “right” we domainers can request for our investments in our domains’ lives at PS’s, we have nothing to ask. Typein traffic (or “direct navigation,” “name direction,” etc) has now become a term that doesn’t necessarily mean “revenue” if you’re parking your domain. Nobody talks about buying domains at “multiples” anymore. Notice that? I have.
It is old news by now that PPC revenue as a main revenue source for domainers has died, and nobody in the Parking Service Industry (fictional organization) is pitching a more jolly future for PPC. Why not? Why aren’t the biggest PS’s blasting out news releases, exhorting a future where domainers can keep parking for good revenue? Why aren’t they pushing a bright future for domain parking in their emails, in the top domain forums and on the popular domain blog sites?
I haven’t received any emails from any PS telling me to “hang on, the future is bright because ‘XYZ’, and ‘ABC’ is going to happen to increase your payouts by continuing to park with us.” Just ask your PS rep to explain in detail, why your payouts have decreased over 50% in the last year. I am welcoming everyone to post here any “reasons” you’ve been told why your domains are earning less and less each month with PPC.
True domainers can’t wait for the “Spin of Payout Perdition”. Our business isn’t Fox News. Happily, other options offer more value and success for domainers than traditional PS’s. For domainers and their non-performing longtails and niche generics, it’s quickly going to be about content, and more content, and then refcomms, ebooks, storefronts, and more useful content which will prove where the real value is for a domain’s future. Bottom line, a domain name is only a tool for an END USER. You heard it here first: The value of a domain name is determined solely by the end user. Not PPC through landing pages. (That doesn’t mean YOU can’t become an end user of your own domain.)
If domainers don’t connect with a viable end user demographic, they will have to either:
1) Become an end user (try building out a directory to sell ad spots to your domain’s relevant end users)
2) Suffer through poor PPC payouts and measure the annual revenue from each domain to see if it even pays for itself.
3) Sell the domain quickly for cheap, because all the facts of the monetization power of the domain haven’t yet been gathered or developed.
Do you have the money to hang on to hundreds or thousands of your niche-powered descriptive domains when the easy days of PPC landing pages no longer pays out? Even using your own Google/Yahoo adlinks doesn’t guarantee revenue on SET (Search Engine Traffic). Maybe affiliates can convert for you if you spend time capturing the SE indexing power of your site.
Domainers have to make a decision about their portfolios quickly, or they might find themselves with hundreds of decent generic domains coming due for renewal each month and none of them are producing revenue. You’ll be spending hours each day deciding which domains can be quickly sold at bulk discount, slashed prices, or which domains can be renewed again for another year while you figure out how to monetize it. Great niche phrase domains that corner a certain market can take your finances down while you’re figuring out how to pay for their renewals. I’ve seen many of my clients go through this problem, and it’s always the same — Great domain, doesn’t get typeins, and if it does, those typeins are no longer producing decent revenue.
The thing that makes me the most suspicious is that the uniques haven’t dropped on my domains, but the CTR has. Suspicious of what, I don’t know. Maybe someone can tell all of us what is going on. Maybe a “Domainer Union” needs to be formed so we can put forth a voice that asks the companies that make millions off our domain traffic every month what we want to know.
Do we have questions on why uniques are staying strong, but CTR is dropping 70%? CPC’s dropping 50% and more? Is this because of a drop in online advertisers or bid pricing for Google and Yahoo click ads? I don’t think so. But I also don’t have an answer for this almost total destruction of PPC payouts for non-Naturals. I’ve talked to the execs at every top PPC company, and their answers are almost identical — “Blame the source – Google, Yahoo, whoever, they are paying out less”.
Thankfully for me and hopefully others, I don’t depend on domain PPC revenue and never have. I’m a domain flipper so I make my money on domain sales. and that’s where having content and SE indexing is so important. It’s like this: You’re driving a Porsche Carrera to find a treasure you know is at the top of a mountain, but when you get there you find the treasure is a box full of Enron stock certificates and the ghost of Kenneth Lay guarding it with a poster of GW Bush. You quickly start looking closer at your Porsche, and determining what its value is. Are you going to race it or sell it?
The most important thing you can do for any domain that you aren’t making any revenue on by parking is to take advantage of the free content development services that WhyPark.com provides. I advise my readers and my clients to check their monthly PPC payouts and redirect all their domains that are making zero moolah to WhyPark. You can bulk upload them with no effort. Fine tune them later. At least you’ll have the chance to get the domains indexed on some search engines, which will give you an edge in flipping the domain to an end user.
Stay tuned.
4 Responses to “WITHOUT PPC, HOW CAN A DOMAINER SURVIVE?”
By Anthony on Aug 19, 2009
1 + 1 = 2 = 1
A domainer union will not help when you now have only 2 main players. The only way PPC will come back up is for new players to come in and change the algo.
Anthony
By Acro on Aug 19, 2009
Stephen, a well-rounded post.
In my opinion, CTR dropped because of the proliferation of “parked pages”. In other words, the visitors became accustomed to the look and feel of parked templates and are easy to identify them as such, leaving the page without clicking. There are also several tools in the market that block parked domains as soon as the visitor types the URL in the browser or clicks on a link that’d take them there. There is one such browser plug-in that feeds on a database of 40+ million parked domains; there are a couple of firewall software applications that do the same. We are at war.
XXXXXX Stephen Douglas Responds:
Hi Acky,
Another comment was made similar to yours… I am in this camp sitting around your fire on it, too. I think users are quickly recognizing a “landing page” and just clicking back or hitting “home” button again. It’s definitely going to severely change the landscape of domain monetization, and soon.
By .h2o. on Aug 19, 2009
“The thing that makes me the most suspicious is that the uniques haven?t dropped on my domains, but the CTR has.”
It may be because users are becoming more savvy to tell the difference between a developed site and a parked page.
This is just a thought that I am throwing out there. It is not just parked pages, but Adsense websites as well. When are more able to pinpoint the ads from the content, they are more not to click on them. When the Internet was “new” the users could not tell the difference. Now they can.
2 cents.
XXXXXX Stephen Douglas Responds:
That was a great 2 cents, because it makes sense. Good call, thx.
By John on Sep 2, 2009
Great Post and Responses.
When I asked my rep at Sedo why my parking revenues had plummeted (75% over 4 months), i was politely informed that ‘it had happened to everyone’…Gee, thanks–far from comforting and even less enlightening.
Does manual optimization (keywords, etc.) of parked domains at the PS make a big difference in your opinion? I realize that some PS’s try to do it for you but with dubious results.
And what are the chances of a PS (such as Sedo) taking a smaller piece of the parking-revenue pie (e.g., 75/25 split versus 50/50)? Increased volume may lead to higher revenues for them over the long haul and so we’d all be happy. But fat chance, I’m sure, but just a thought.
XXXXXX Stephen Douglas Responds:
I will reveal here to you (and lucky for anyone taking the time to read my response this deep down)… the best way to monetize your sites for NOW is to get them SE indexed anyway you can. Forget PS’s unless you’re getting a clear 40% CTR with an average of $.20 a click on at least 10 visitors daily. If you’re not getting that, move your domains to a content builder, get the content on them for possible SE indexing, and shop them around to end users (or they may just find you once your content has achieved indexing).
If you PARK YOUR DOMAINS at PS’s that feature PPC links only, your site will never get indexed, and it’s basically like fishing without bait on your hook. Put some bait on your hook and wait… I recommend WhyPark… but go through my referral link (on this blog) for the preferred treatment!