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
.usThe 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.
Parked.com has a status called “quality block” that virtually any secondary extension, regardless of keyword quality, is subject to. I believe it feeds in alternative, lower paying ads.
Parking in general is not a great business model when dealing in secondary extensions, as most don’t come with any major type in traffic anyway.
Brad
Should be a wakeup call for people buying in these extensions. Strong associations with spam and low quality sites, that won’t ever change.
Yes, this affects Parked, WhyPark and all Yahoo providers running the domain match feeds. In our case at Parked/WhyPark, when any domain gets capped or is not supported by Yahoo, we display ads from second-tier providers. Those generally pay less than Yahoo ads would have, but they at least continue to provide revenue.
Craig
What parking companies have a Google feed? I would like to move there…
@ Bruce
I believe Internet Traffic has a Google feed.
This is bad news for .co and next will be renewal rate (so far is good as the best domains were registered first).
I am interested what .co is going to say about yahoo decision.
wow they included .co as well. i believe .co doesn’t have a bright future.
.COM is the only domain one should own. The general public will never buy into or remember the other extensions. Don’t waste your time or money with them.
“Never” is a long time. I think short, 1-2 real-word memorable and versatile names in the secondary extensions will always continue to grow in value. ChessSet.us just sold for $1.55 on ebay – these are great investments imho.
Yahoo and their nazi CEO have been classifying domains based on the TLD for years now, with the introduction of the Yahoo TQ score. I moved all of my domains from Parked to Sedo and immediately saw insane increase in revenue. Yahoo is small fries compared to Google.
Real business models built on those domains won’t care about the Yahoo revenue cap.
From what i understand, Y! has added new TLDs that can be monetized now. If there are domains that we feel are really good, we can work with them to move them to higher revenue tiers. The system is very flexible.
@ AG
You say “From what I understand, Yahoo has added” and you also say “we”. Do you work for Yahoo and assuming you do, can you please provide some clarity to your statement. It’s a bit confusing. How would someone work with Yahoo to move them to hire rev tiers?