Let me explain one thing, I have never said anybody who was terminated by the request of Yahoo this week was committing fraud. When I look at the details of all hits, referrers, searches, and clicks, I can now tell that some fraudulent activity was happening on their domains, but that does not mean it was by the domainer. In most cases I wouldn't have personally shut them down without the request of our search providers. There were some people that were flat out cheating us, the domainers, the advertisers, and the industry, but I have not seen any of those people on this board unless they are just lurking.
One more thing on conversion ratios. Let's say you have 10 domains in an account with us. All of the domains are "basket weaving" domains, the overall "basket weaving" market converts at 20% across all parking companies and all large search companies, and you are doing 5%, you wouldn't be terminated, it just means we need to make sure your people really are looking for "basket weaving". But if you account
#2 and it's in the "baked goods" market which has an industry wide conversion of 1% and your domains convert at 0%, then we will look at you really hard. Anything that converts at 0% we look at very hard.
But it's also about volume, if you send one click and it doesn't convert, you won't be terminated. You send 50,000 clicks and none of them convert, well. And the ones that were terminated last week were in this boat.
CaptainCommunist - First we don't use Google, and the Yahoo and Google concepts of domain parking are completely different. In almost all cases all Google based companies go direct to results pages or 1 click landers. These landers include sometimes flash tutorials and ringtones all on the same page. Yahoo on the other hand requires us to go to a 2 click lander unless they tell us that the domain can go to a 1 click lander because they like the main phrase of the domain.
I've never said anything about Bob's article before, but let me make a few comments.
Back when each company had one registrar selling domains was fun. Your customers would come in and buy domains, you would invent new things to help them and in our case most of the time give it away for free.
Then the drop came out. Enom, dotster, Pool, snapnames and a few others registered 20-50 additional registrars/creds each. And started registering all of the domains this way, we played with this for a while, it was exciting for a few weeks, then we stopped.
But then you have what Bob Parson's calls Domain Kiting, I like to call it "Bobbing for Domains". We first had a customer about 2 years ago who currently owns a domain registrar and also owns a domain parking company come in an register about 100,000 domains one day. We were jumping up and down, then the next day the registered another 100,000 domains, and the following day they did it again, and on the 4th day, they came to us and said we need to delete x. As far as I knew that wasn't possible. But I found out it was, but then we tried to make a little money, so we told them $0.05 for everyone they deleted, they didn't register anymore domains with us.
About a year goes by and we have somebody else come in and register 2-3 hundred thousands domains and actually keep them. Then after they didn't make as much money as they expected about a month later they asked for a refund, well that didn't happen. But after I explained to them what we could do going forward they started registering domains.
So does Bob Parson's having his story straight? Well, actually he's desperate, see he needs something to talk about because his company is going public in a few months and he needs to drum up some cash so that he can start "bobbing for domains" as well. You see if you read the GoDaddy (I would love to use the name that I normally call them) prospectus you will see that they don't make any money, they never have from day one. You pay them money today and they spend it today. If he doesn't go public, there will be a fire sale soon. I've always wondered what would happen if a domain registrar goes belly up. But everybody here and myself the day it goes public will buy shares make some money and go from there.
Now I talk to the guys from Godaddy at all of the conferences they are great guys and I have always respected what they do and how they do things. At last count does anybody know who is the largest domain parking company in the world? Domain Sponsor, Sedo? Nope, it's godaddy. I heard they had over 4.5 million domains parked. So as of today they have 12 million or so domains that means that almost 40% of there domains are parked. I'd like to get that check every month. But I can tell you that from my domain registrar experience, we don't have 40% of our customers park their domains. Maybe godaddy is buying domains themselves.
According to Daily Changes here are the top domain additions by registrar this month.
Daily Changes - Monthly
DomainDoorman, llc 718073
GoDaddy.com 472619
NameKing 458793
That's a lot of domains. I wonder if Bob is bobbing?
Sorry Captain no bashing.
Donny
