One of my biggest problems is being interested in domains as an investor, site developer, & working in an ad agency. These three industries do not have the same mindsets.
I can write about IDN related stuff more because it’s not a direct “main” function of my work at GroupM. I do domain related work for clients & have been for the last 5 years but it’s usually an on demand basis.
Seeing a recent comment on a post on Elliot’s blog that parking is something that no one knows anything about & it’s all a black box makes me wonder if people realize where the ads are coming from.
The post is here
http://www.elliotsblog.com/sending-traffic-to-a-parked-page-is-against-tos-4923
I felt the need to step in & talk about why parking is going down. It’s more than what I wrote but the ad industry has changed, the parking companies haven’t done anything to keep up with that because simply they can’t. Google won’t let them. Even the switch for Sedo to use Javascript ads & disallow redirects. It’s not to prevent clickfraud it’s to prevent your parked pages from showing up in the Google results. Also if you can’t use a redirect you certainly aren’t showing up.
When I read comments like “no one knows were traffic comes from” I just realize people certainly don’t have my clients. I would be like a pink elephant in the room if I ever told my clients that we don’t know where all this traffic is coming from it just appears. There’s ways of analyzing your parking traffic. Use an iFrame put analytics tags in there & redirect it to the parking page.
It’s also strange to me that many young people are buying domains & trying to make product related sites & using internet marketing to bring revenue. I started to buy domains to develop for the Japanese market. I started to buy IDN domains with the same purpose. I’ll admit I have a few domains (less than 20) that each year will make multiples of it’s registration cost without me doing anything. I have domains that I’ve developed that mostly at least makes it’s registration cost or more each month.
I don’t believe in magic traffic. I do believe in browser redirects which Google has been steadily wiping away for the last 6 years because if you aren’t analyzing where the traffic is coming from, Google at least is.