To Parked:I regret that my account has been suspended though I don't know why you do

[netfounder]

agree with you.

Thank you for the explanation.
As far as I know that if the convertion rate of ppc company traffic is lower than average yahoo CTR, yahoo can refuse to pay the ppc company. Then both sides lost money.
By the way, I think it is not related with first world or third world. Maybe it is better to treat this case by case.

 

[Raider]

Everybody gets fraudulent/invalid traffic, it's just the nature of the beast.

Your post did not address my questions about where all the money goes when you terminate an account...I'll post it again;

Assuming the traffic was fraudulant, certainly not all of it was. Lets say out of this $3500, that $500 of it was found to be fraudulent, what gives you or any other PPC service the right to keep the remaining? NOT all of the $3500 goes back to Yahoo, and if it did, I would think you would have an obligation to prove it to the person who funds your keeping. I dont have any issues with you Donny, I just question situations like these.

RG

 

[chois]

Your post did not address my questions about where all the money goes when you terminate an account...I'll post it again;

Assuming the traffic was fraudulant, certainly not all of it was. Lets say out of this $3500, that $500 of it was found to be fraudulent, what gives you or any other PPC service the right to keep the remaining? NOT all of the $3500 goes back to Yahoo, and if it did, I would think you would have an obligation to prove it to the person who funds your keeping. I dont have any issues with you Donny, I just question situations like these.

RG

Yeah, I want to know, too.

 

[Imm]

I think you got your terms there confused, Donny. You meant to say, traffic that the search engines don't deem valuable. If you're seriously accusing en masse the domain parkers of fraudulent traffic you'd better back it up with syslogs of referrers, pop-up campaigns etc. It's funny because it's the very same search engines that generate this traffic they call invalid: visits of scanner bots and crawlers.

Search engines and websites like visits of scanner bots and crawlers: Yes.
Advertisers like to pay for bot clicks/non-targeted traffic clicks: No.

All these fraud clicks/bot/crawlers/non-converting clicks detection filters are enforced by Parked and Yahoo for a reason. To get a clearer idea we need to look at the whole picture: the closely intertwined relationship between advertisers, 1st-tier publishers (Google, Yahoo) and 2nd-tier publishers (parking companies, website publishers, domain parking etc).

The whole parking industry exists and continue to exist for a sole reason: that advertisers are able to draw in leads that CONVERT to sales.

If advertisers can no longer get a sale from advertising on a parked page will they want to continue to advertise on parked sites? No.

Will parking industry still exists if there are no advertisers? No.

Who calls the shot in the parking industry? We will need to look at where the money originates: the advertisers. They decide where to put the money where it converts best into sales. Most domainers will want to park at the company where they can earn the most revenue, likewise advertisers will want to advertise at the provider where they can get the best conversion. Can you imagine the repercussion if invalid clicks are counted? Advertisers will need to pay more to convert and they will switch to other form of advertising that can convert better. If parking sites have the lowest coversion rate then Yahoo or Google may be forced to drop off parking sites in order to woo back advertisers and to maintain a decent conversion rate. If that is the case then the parking industry will be heading towards a downward spiral.

If we look purely from the domainer's point of view, we will only see us as the "customers" and parking companies are the "sales people" trying to earn commission from us. But if we look at the whole picture, the advertisers are in fact the customers and we are the sub-providers trying to earn commission from them. Maintaining good coversion rate for parking sites compared to other form of online advertising is the key factor to the survivability of the parking industry. Therefore all these fraud clicks/bot/crawlers/non-converting clicks detection filters are there in placed for a very good reason.

 

[katherine]

Does it mean that if I want to bust somebody's account all I have to do is to drive fake traffic and generate artificial clicks ?
What checks are in place to protect honest domainers against malevolent actions ?
How would a parking company react to the the equivalent of a DOS action against domain names ?

 

[Donny Simonton]

I think you got your terms there confused, Donny. You meant to say, traffic that the search engines don't deem valuable. If you're seriously accusing en masse the domain parkers of fraudulent traffic you'd better back it up with syslogs of referrers, pop-up campaigns etc. It's funny because it's the very same search engines that generate this traffic they call invalid: visits of scanner bots and crawlers.

50% of all domains at some point in a month will generate some type of bad traffic. It could be Verisign crawling each domain to see if it's a parked domain or if it's a real site, and their bot may not follow the robots.txt file. It could be some researcher attempting to scrap our pages for information in some project. Or it could be an advertiser looking to piss off his competitors. If any bot comes in and searches but never clicks out to the advertiser, I could care less about that. I'm only concerned about bad traffic that clicks out. So this is what I meant by bad traffic, this is the mjajority of invalid/fradulent/bad traffic. Again I never said it was generated by the domainer, sometimes it is, but usually it can be detected.

Your post did not address my questions about where all the money goes when you terminate an account...I'll post it again;

Assuming the traffic was fraudulant, certainly not all of it was. Lets say out of this $3500, that $500 of it was found to be fraudulent, what gives you or any other PPC service the right to keep the remaining? NOT all of the $3500 goes back to Yahoo, and if it did, I would think you would have an obligation to prove it to the person who funds your keeping. I dont have any issues with you Donny, I just question situations like these.

RG

First remember we are not a PPC company, we are domain parking monetization/domain parking company. We do not deal with the advertisers at all except for when they are mad. When I tell our providers this account has been terminated, they usually remove all of the revenue from that account with us immediately. I checked 3 accounts that were terminated last week and none of them have money in them any longer. They have told me in the past they refund the advertiser, I have not attempted to create a Yahoo account and click out on one of my links from a parking company then terminate the account to see if they really refund it. I just don't have that much time. So I don't keep any funds when an account is terminated.

Does it mean that if I want to bust somebody's account all I have to do is to drive fake traffic and generate artificial clicks ?
What checks are in place to protect honest domainers against malevolent actions ?
How would a parking company react to the the equivalent of a DOS action against domain names ?

It actually works that way with all parking companies. But it depends on what they use to determine fraudulent clicks. Let's say you created a bot to attack somebody, which this has happened, and you decided to hit a domainers domains and click out with the intention of getting him kicked out. Usually after a few minutes of strange traffic our filters put domains on a special alert to run additional filters on the traffic. And in some cases, the bots are now sending traffic to pages that really go nowhere. And starting next month, based on certain data especially if it's a bot and it attempts to click out we will be showing it a captcha page. If after a few captcha pages that haven't been filled out and the "surfer" still is clicking, they will be banned for 24 hours.

We currently have 5 DOS attacks hitting us right now. They are all being smashed like grapes right now, we have over $500k worth of DOS protection today, and this doesn't include our own in house systems we have developed. No attack has affected us in over 4 months and the last one we figured out how to stop it in about 5 minutes.

Hope this answers all of the questions.

Donny

 

[sudesh]

Very interesting questions and very descriptive answers. Donny, thanks for keeping this industry clean for all of us. I can see some kind of "cleaning" taking place in the parking industry and that is good for all of us. I am enjoying reading the comments here and everyone has a great point to make and lots to ponder. Keep this going!!!

 

[Tia Wood]

Imm, great explanation!

Thanks Donny for explaining things. I like to feel confident that parking companies are as much for the domainers as much as for the advertisers. One cannot make revenue without the other. The advertisers only hold half the cards. What's the use of paying for targeted traffic if there is none? You wouldn't have that without domainers.....

 

[Theo]

The problem is, there is no data to be audited by both parties. The parking company holds its cards closed and decides what to tag as "bad traffic" and discloses no raw data. Because for the more experienced of us that maintain our own DNS and access logs it would be an easy task to see upon comparison whether the parking company can justify their revoking of revenue.

 

[stew2yk]

Very Good idea to run your own DNS server, might try that on the next parking comapany I use. Any suggestions apart from Parked.com that have high payouts anyone!

Regards

Stu

 

[Raider]

When I tell our providers this account has been terminated, they usually remove all of the revenue from that account with us immediately. I checked 3 accounts that were terminated last week and none of them have money in them any longer. They have told me in the past they refund the advertiser, I have not attempted to create a Yahoo account and click out on one of my links from a parking company then terminate the account to see if they really refund it. I just don't have that much time. So I don't keep any funds when an account is terminated.

OK Donny, 2 more questions, when you terminate an account, is there any proof you sent the termination to the provider or that they received it? 2nd, If your able to go into those terminated accounts and see no money, do you provide snapshots or any other records to the owners of those accounts?

Thanks again.....RG

 

[Donny Simonton]

RG - I wrote something up on this yesterday, and remembered hitting submit. Not sure what happened to it though. Oh well, here we go again.

There is no proof that I send anything to Yahoo for example about a termination. At least none that I am aware of.

The accounts with say Yahoo aren't really accounts, basically what they have is a username, domain, hits, searches, clicks, revenue. And I get this every day. Normally you never go back after you download the reports for a day. But after I terminate an account usually within 2-3 days, the previous data for that username is gone if I go back and run a previous report.

Donny

 

[stew2yk]

dont use Parked.com unless you want 15 days revenue down the drain!

 

[Donny Simonton]

Don't cheat Parked.com and it's advertisers and you won't have to worry about losing 15 days worth of revenue.

Donny

 

[Theo]

Don't treat your customers as cheaters by default and you won't see people complain about Parked's practices.

Example: in your template code you have this reference that makes it obvious what you think of our traffic and visitors:

<a href="/click.php?clickfraud=1">

Nice eh?

 

[katherine]

Example: in your template code you have this reference that makes it obvious what you think of our traffic and visitors:

Nice eh?

I have seen this URL somewhere in a domain, what is the purpose of the clickfraud parameter ?

 

[Donny Simonton]

Actually, let's look at the full code.

<a href="/click.php?clickfraud=1"><img src="/img/default/s.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0"></a>

This says anything that can view and click on a single pixel gif is probably a bot. Which in my book if you can click on a single pixel gif, you are some type of bot.

I never treat our customers as cheaters, that code was designed to stop bots. Click on it and see what happens. Until you have run a parking company you do not know all of the things people will do to attempt to make a quick buck. There are about 5 other hidden ways to stop bots on that page as well, that one is just very noticeable.

Donny

 

[Theo]

Donny, my point - which you missed - was made in order to display that your reference is explicit and you might as well put "mofo=1" there. It shows no courtesy to the domain owner whose traffic your company uses. Until you have polished the approach you've taken towards the bottom feeders of your pyramid, I find it offensive that I am viewed as a potential fraud.

 

[namestrands]

wow.. where did this all come from? sheesh I missed out on so damn much lately.

Well, I still love parked.

Not sure what all the bitchin is about with respect to parked retaining funds from people who commit fraud, I for one would think that someone who blatantly tries to screw the system and gets caught would forfeit the right to any and all revenue generated regardless of whether or not yahoo pay the parking program.

I would hope that were someone to attack my domains with a view to get me banned, parked would go on my past history with them, I would gladly forfeit any revenue generated. However were Yahoo to say "Piss Off Ban Him" then I could hardly hold parked responsible. I can bitch and moan about it, but it would get diluted very quickly and no doubt the other parking programs would see me as a bit of a trouble maker. ;-)

As for the click fraud link most other parking programs have the same function all be it they call it something other than clickfraud.. but you got to love that they call a spade a spade and don't try to pretend it to be anything else.

Lets look at the facts here:

Revenue Ok: Check
Records 90%+ of traffic sent: Check
Pays Out on Time: Check
Great Customer Service: Check

How many other parking programs can say the same?

You can hardly punish a program for telling it like it is, and keeping it real.

I may or may not earn more than on other programs, nor may I make thousands every month. I am just happy in knowing that I can rely on payments and customer service and a little more transparency than the rest.

I truly reckon that Donny does a stand up job, and it really is a shame that no one else can see that.

 

[Raider]

There is no proof that I send anything to Yahoo for example about a termination. At least none that I am aware of.

The accounts with say Yahoo aren't really accounts, basically what they have is a username, domain, hits, searches, clicks, revenue. And I get this every day. Normally you never go back after you download the reports for a day. But after I terminate an account usually within 2-3 days, the previous data for that username is gone if I go back and run a previous report.

Donny

OK, this is what I thought...It really comes down to the customer trusting the parking service 100% doesn't it?

I'm certainly not accusing you of doing this, but you very well could it. If you didn't like stew2yk's traffic or my traffic for that matter for whatever reason, you can say, "I terminated his account and all money has been returned to the advertisers", That statement alone could very well be false and Parked could be keeping his revenue, a possibility that cant be overlooked.

I think I'm looking for some accounting here, if 95% of his traffic is legit, and5% looks fraudulent to you, what gives Yahoo/Overture the right to keep the 95% of his revenue?...is it because its written in the TOS? If he contacts Overture, will they provide an accounting?.....$3500 is a lot of money to lose with NO accounting for it.