I received an interesting email from Trafficz this evening that I want to pass along to you regarding a recently imposed “revenue cap” on certain domain extensions, including .CO, .US, and .TV. If you park at a company that uses a Yahoo feed, it may impact your ability to monetize certain domain names.
According to the email sent to Trafficz clients:
“We would like to inform you that Yahoo!, our primary upstream provider, has recently imposed a revenue cap on certain TLDs. The affected TLDs include:
.biz
.co
.info
.tv
.us
The new, conservative revenue cap was rolled out early this morning and will be imposed on a per domain, per day basis. Specifically, if a particular domain in one of the above-referenced TLDs exceeds the revenue cap on any given day, Yahoo! listings will cease to be displayed on that domain for the following three days, at which point they will resume displaying as normal.This change was made across the board and will affect all Yahoo! partners.”
As a result of this new change, it seems that if your “revenue cap” is exceeded, you will stop earning revenue since the ads won’t be displayed for three days. I’ve never heard of a change like this, but it would seem to indicate that perhaps domain owners should consider parking domain names with these extensions at a company with a Google feed (or monetize them in another way, like development).
I didn’t hear anything from Parked, but since I believe they also use a Yahoo feed, this may apply to names in those TLDs parked there as well.
The only reasons I could guess for this change is that Yahoo thinks the traffic quality is poor, there is more click fraud on those particular TLDs, or the traffic is foreign and doesn’t convert as well. I really have no idea though.