Just hearing a few pieces of uncorroborated news coming out that might have an underlying and somewhat negative affect on some of the domain parking providers. Without wanting to be slanderous in anyway im going to sprinkle the word “allegedly” copiously throughout about this post. Anyway, I’m hearing that ASK (who sub syndicate Google’s AFD feed to a few providers) have had their license to sub syndicate the coveted AFD feed withdrawn by Google. Seems that this takes effect from the end of February with no exceptions. Personally I don’t know of any providers that use ASK (aside from the company who told me this information and who use the ASK feed as a backup to their main feed) but apparently this has been in the making for some time. Google apparently have since cherry picked those ASK sub-syndicators that have traction in the market place and given them their own contract and simply allowed the rest to lapse. Quite what any of these companies who are now left high and dry are going to do now is anyones guess but it just goes to show you how fragile being a parking provider actually is. Reliant upon a single customer maintaining a relationship with you is pretty scary stuff.
The other bit of news Ive learned is that Google have also been amending some parking company contracts, lowering the revenue share of those they believe to send in only bad traffic.. Yeah, like smartpricing wasn’t enough already.
Allegedly..!
It has been suggested that the future of PPC is the growth of the advertising exchange. Google is worried about this natural evolution, so are trying to block the subsyndication of their feed wherever they see it used as backfill for other, more lucrative (yet currently less populated) upstream partners.
They can’t hold it back forever, but I’m sure they’ll make it as difficult as they possibly can for startups over the next couple of years.
Hopefully it will cause them to innovate parking and stop relying on google or yahoo. There is more PPC out there that could be used in more creative ways.
It’s not the “AF domains” feed that was being sub-syndicated, it’s the higher quality/paying “AF Search” feed.
[...] addition to Julie’s excellent coverage lately, my sources are indicating the same: ASK.com sub syndication deal is DEAD. What does it mean? Where [...]
Thanks for the track back and kind comments Sahar. But, just one question, who’s Julie?