Acroplex and Doc Com most of the people who are commenting here have been using us for a while. I'm not saying we are perfect, but we are trying to make ourselves better everyday. About the 1 hit and 51 clicks, I think I mentioned this before we pay what we are told to pay, our estimate system should have said not to pay for that. But if Yahoo tells us to pay for 51 clicks, we pay you for 51 clicks, that has been our policy, sometimes in cases like this I wish I used the same policy as Sedo bu that could also be why a lot of people are using us now.
Last week I mentioned that the bot issue in our estimate system had been resolved and I'm sure you can ask anybody around who uses Parked that we are no longer having that issue. Our estimate system will never be perfect unless we start paying from our estimates, but we don't have any plans on doing that anytime soon.
Donny
The mere fact that the same feeds (not the case in our comparison here) produce a large variety in CPC rates shows how unregulated this industry is.
I would love to say the domain parking industry will be regulated in my life time, but I don't see how it will ever be possible. For example, as a domain registrar I pay the same price for domains as do all of the domain registrars. I have contracts with ICANN that says that's how it will work.
But in the parking business, one person may get 50% from Yahoo/Google and the next one might be getting 90%, some of it may be based on the luck of the draw, the volume they represent, that they are switching from another provider, or some sales person needs to meet a quota. So that's one major problem. One of the others is how much did you personally make. Yahoo tells us on a domain level how much you made, Google has one system that pays that way and another one that lumps all totals for a day into one number. This is especially where the estimates come in. If a provider has 1 lump sum, how do they know what to pay you? They don't, so they estimate your revenue with the hope that the revenue they receive from the provider is more than what they are paying you.
If your numbers are final at 11:59:59pm each day, you could be making more money than you should or less, because you are being paid on the estimate not on the real numbers you in my opinion are owed. But each parking company has their own way handling this in many ways. No system is perfect with estimates, whether you pay on estimates or if they are just their to give people an idea on how much money they are making throughout the day.
Another reason why rates fluctuate say between Google providers (assuming all using AFD feed) is besides what percentage they are being paid. Which could also be an issue because a large portion of the AFD contracts are tiered which means you get 65% if you do X, 70% if you do y, 75% if you do z, how are you getting paid. If they are getting 75% at the end of the month are you getting paid based on the 65% number? The last part is how much of the overall percentage are you getting from the parking company. Are you getting 50% of what the parking company is getting, 85%, 30%?
There isn't a parking company manual, people have learned over time what works best for them and their partners and for the surfers. Yahoo/Google/Ask will not tell us what we can do, but they will tell us what we can't do. I remember reading that Ed from Namedrive said they had to change/remove the icons on their adult template because Google didn't like it because the icons seemed they related to the search results. But at the same time I have heard that Yahoo didn't like the thumbnails that Trafficz is using on their sites now as well, but they still seem to be up and I think they are cool. We have over 3,400 templates right now and we had Yahoo ask us to not go too raunchy on our adult templates, to me that means just don't show anything, but then our other provider wasn't happy with one of the templates that Yahoo said was fine.
In the end it's all what the advertisers want. If they don't like the Trafficz thumbnails, they will be removed. If enough complain about one of our templates it would be gone as well. And the same goes for a domain and one of our partners. Get written up in a national magazine for having a bunch of TM's in your system and Yahoo/Google will be calling you in 30 seconds.
Enough rambling from me. The only way you will get regulation in the domain parking industry is if there was only one provider like in the domain name business. So unless Microsoft which will have a feed in the near future, Google, or Yahoo buys all of the rest of the companies, I don't see any regulations being set down anytime soon. Unless we all switch to CPA and then my life would be much easier. Wait then I would be relying on the advertisers to tell Yahoo/Google if somebody actually bought something. Yeah, that will happen!
Donny