-> Parked.com announce that Yahoo arbitrage is finished. Well, they cunningly announced that ‘its finished’ both on their platform and on a global level. Their arbitrage is due to finish about the time… Well, about the time of this post. No news however from the other Yahoo fed providers, which I find interesting because the email sent out from Parked announces that its a “yahoo” decision, intimating that the entire Yahoo network is now devoid of arbitrage – forgetting to point out however that certain companies within the Yahoo Publisher network actually have arbitrage licenses. I wonder what happens now?
-> Ask.com fed providers (skenzo excluded it seems) lose their feed as of the 1st March – although no-one seems to be able to clarify or deny this – bodis.com and parkingpanel.com to name just a couple seem to be most affected – and all this despite continuous posts and questions on the forums for which the owners of these providers frequent. I guess we can say that their silence speaks volumes. Im guessing if its true they are either running around trying to get a license or sub license, attempting to sell their customers to the highest bidder or are just gonna take this months revenue and split ……. [did i just say that..... 
]
-> Yahoo turn down Microsoft’s offer to buy them out and then go off and spend $160m on Maven Networks.. The mind boggles on that one.
-> So called “mini sites” seem to be as “in the dark” as they were a week or two ago. Seems Google started clamping down on MFA sites (such as whypark.com) about the same time they had a glitch in them globally serving their adsense ads as a whole. All of which contributed to the mass hysteria amongst so called “publishers”. Important to note here that imodo.com released a flaky statement that said basically google wouldnt support their platform, as once perhaps they did. Evolanding.com seems to have flipped to serving YPN and whypark… Well, being as though whypark aren’t a long-tail profit orientated company (choosing to charge domainers up front for their services), I guess they dont give a hoot.
Seems a lot in just a few days.
Id also like to raise a glass to domainnamewire.com who seem to always be waiting for a call back from Yahoo or Google or Ask and able to quote from “multiple sources” for their information when, to the layman or someone that dapples in domaining, to simply be quoting directly from individual forums or from other blogs (including this one) and not willing to give due credit for their information source. Way to go guys.
Next week seems like fun. Im personally amazed by how many arbitrage folk have come out of the woodwork and claiming that their income is gonna be negatively impacted to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a month, when i thought arbitrage died about 3 yrs ago.
Still, its T.R.A.F.F.I.C coming up this week. I’m not going but I just read Rick’s latest post and what made me smile is his resilience in the face of negativity. I don’t think any news could possibly come out that would deter Rick from turning it into a domain positive. The US economy is going into recession. Domain prices will rise. NATO has declared war on every non-NATO country. Domain prices will rise. The Internet will go off line for 2 yrs. Domain prices will rise… A giant meteorite is headed our way……. you get the picture! I hear on the grapevine that a few folk who said they laughed at the Rick Schwartz parody blog (as reported previously) have been banned from Rick’s forum.. I can only but *sigh* at that one.
Anyway, keep your peckers up folks, at least we own the traffic… don’t we?
Hey, great summary. I’ve added your blog to my RSS reader (even though it violates my dont-add-a-blog until it’s 6 months old rule).
Regarding Ask – note that Skenzo is saying “this won’t affect us at all”. Well, the Ask subfeed is gone, so the only way this won’t affect this is if a) they never had that feed, which I’ve had many people tell me they do or b) they subbed it with another feed, as has been suggested. So I don’t think Skenzo is “excluded” or given special treatment. But that’s not to say they don’t have an alternative.
Regarding arbitrage – who has arbitrage licenses? The big players like Marchex and NameMedia? I haven’t heard of this, but it sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll give Yahoo a call
Thanks for the toast and keep up the good work.
Very informative and well written Julia. You’ve got a new subscriber.
-Bill
Thanks Andrew.
Actually Im being told that some ASK fed companies have been given direct Google AFD deals. Im sure a co the size of Skenzo is one of these.
J
Hy Julia,
Since now i worked with parked.com
Now i’m looking for a partner were i can put my domains end even make promotions on them. On the moment my revenue was arround 100 000$ a month, minus all the costs for marketing still a good incoming.
What suprice me at most is that skenzo don’t have a phone or fax number published. Such a Big Comapany can only be contacted by Mail?
Question: is it nessacary to have a “good” contact at skenzo (person there is customer/partner) to even get a account? I just fill out the sign up form twice almoust 3days a go – no answer.
Are there some alternatives to skenzo?
Thanks in Advance
jay
Concerning WhyPark, while this hasn’t been a network-wide issue for our sites, we absolutely do care. Many sites on WhyPark serve up AdSense ads without issue. In a lot of cases, those sites have added some custom content or customized their sites in other ways.
We have signed contracts this week with several ad providers, so we’ll be able to start split testing ads across our network to find those that perform the highest.
While the one-time fee may seem crazy to some, we’ve been really working on customer acquisition and getting people to see the benefits of using WhyPark. As we add our own ad network, plus a number of optional subscription and managed services in the coming months, the bigger picture of our service will be much more visible.
“Actually Im being told that some ASK fed companies have been given direct Google AFD deals. Im sure a co the size of Skenzo is one of these.”
That would make sense. I’m not sure why Skenzo didn’t have a direct feed with them in the first place.
[...] There’s more promising news regarding its relationship with Yahoo. Earlier this week I reported that Yahoo is killing click arbitrage, which Marchex participates in. However, this change may not affect Marchex. [...]
[...] with some large domain portfolio owners switching over to their system. Then in February ‘08 the plug was pulled on the Google feed syndication through Ask.com. Revenues reportedly bottomed out and signs of life from ParkingPanel were few and far between. [...]