2014 has been a year of changes for Thought Convergence. In September of this year, Aftermarket.com was acquired by Igloo.com and Agreed Escrow was acquired by Escrow.com. Both companies that were acquired were owned and operated by Thought Convergence.
In an email update to clients this morning, Thought Convergence announced that its TrafficZ parking service will be shutting down for good on December 31. According to the email that was signed by Ammar Kubba and Kevin Vo:
“As you no doubt have heard by now, we recently announced the sales of our Aftermarket domain marketplace and our Agreed online escrow platform. In parallel with those sales, we will be discontinuing the TrafficZ domain parking and monetization service as of December 31, 2014.
In order to facilitate a smooth and seamless transition for you, our valued clients, we recommend that you explore alternative monetization providers and options for your domain assets. Many of our friends in the industry provide excellent domain management and monetization solutions, so we’re confident that you’ll find a suitable partner in no time.
Regardless of what you decide, though, please make sure to update your nameservers by 12:00 AM PST on next Wednesday, December 31, 2014, after which time we will no longer be serving ads from our upstream providers.”
As recommended in the email, TrafficZ customers should look into using a different parking service ASAP or their domain names will no longer be monetized. I am quite sure there are other operators that would be happy to have the additional business.
TrafficZ was founded in 2002, and it was a popular domain parking platform. I am unsure of how many clients are impacted by this move, but my guess is that the number is fairly small. I presume if there was a large book of business, we would have seen a sale of the platform (and customers) rather than a shut down. TrafficZ was the first parking company I used, so the closure is a bit more sentimental to me.
Looks like parking is dead.
There are over 34k domains still pointed towards Trafficz. Including a few of mine that I haven’t gotten around to changing.
Amar did a good job with TZ for the first 5 yrs but it started going downhill over 6 yrs ago when Yahoo started turning the screw.
Yahoo/Bing is probably the largest destroyer of ppc revenue. And, G figured they had an exclusive so they also started turning the screw. (reducing payout)
The lack of transparency has always been the biggest problem with ppc. However, Frank has totally overcome that problem because ‘we’ trust him.
And, I don’t believe it is blind trust.
Hopefully, Amar made out when he sold that division. I am sure it was very profitable during the first 7 yrs.
Side note, we all thought Amar overpaid for DomainTools when he bought it from Jay for $13mil(?). And, later some noise about A. not paying all of the installments. (trying to mentally recall Jay’s complaint.) Now, I suspect DT might have been a good buy.
indeed I agree, DT definately is a good buy, due to lots of subscriptions, and big players to be using it and brand.
Its good they had closed its trafficz, anyone who is in parking space except frank, are struggling to gain clients or revenue, its big all uphill for them, we will see a trend follow trafficz soon.
Best to A Kubba! quite the guy!
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~Patricia Kaehler — Ohio USA