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 I’ve never been one to mince my words but when I speak to other parking companies we are all seeing a flood of fraudulent activity over the last couple of months. The problem is that ultimately it largely ends up at Google or Yahoo’s doorstep to deal with……after all they are the ones that have to deal with the advertisers.
What advertisers want is natural, real traffic that has real live humans sitting at a screen that either arrived at a site via natural type-in or a link. This is the reason why every parking company has terms and conditions that forbid some of the following activities.
Arbitrage traffic.
Arbitrage is buying traffic for low and selling it for high. Typically, it involves buying traffic from 2nd tier traffic providers and selling it to Google or Yahoo. This sounds innocent on the surface but there is a really good reason why it’s a real problem.
* A large amount of the traffic sources are “bot” (ie. non-human) in nature. You may have every intention to buy good quality traffic for a cheap price (unlikely to exist btw) but the person selling you the traffic only just wants to throw volume at you. They don’t really care about quality they care about selling traffic that is both garbage and maybe a few nuggets of gold. It really doesn’t matter to them.
* The people that sell you traffic do so because Google/Yahoo won’t accept it directly. If Google/Yahoo would accept it then you have to ask why the seller doesn't cut out the middle man (ie. you) and send the traffic directly themselves. By having you in the middle they make money but you take the risk of dealing with Google/Yahoo. It also means that they can sell as much garbage traffic to you as possible with absolutely no risk.
Trust me when I say that the “special” source of gold traffic that you’ve discovered is more like “fools gold”. You may make money for a while but then you’ll lose your shirt.
* Arbitrage is a HIGH risk strategy that can lead to great rewards in the short-term BUT it is NOT a long-term business strategy. The problem with arbitrage is that as well as burning a lot of cash you can also quickly destroy your reputation. Some of you may not care too much about this but in business your reputation is everything. Whatever you destroy today for the sake of a few bucks will catch up with you tomorrow. If you don't know this then your either really young or just plain naive.
* There is good arbitrage but it’s very expensive (still risky) and involves much lower returns. I looked closely at it around six years ago and came to the conclusion that it was against the terms and conditions of my upstream partners so I didn’t do it. This is really important to understand – if you break the rules that you’ve agreed to then why the heck should someone pay you????
* The problem with arbitrage is that it’s the constant quest for cheaper traffic to maximise returns……ie. buy more garbage and hopefully some of it will stick to the wall. This is REALLY a bad strategy that will destroy your reputation very quickly….so don’t do it. If you get it to work for a while, you will get greedy and you will be very tempted to going down the slippery traffic quality path. Please don't send any of this traffic to ParkLogic as it's never a pleasant experience sending the "Dear John" email that involves you losing thousands of dollars. I know that you may think your traffic is good but we still don't want it. Natural type-in is what we monetise best.
* Arbitrage is all about gaming the system. You end up crossing your fingers hoping to not get caught doing something that you know deep down isn’t sustainable and is likely to provide little to no value to advertisers.
* For those of you that read this and think I don’t know what I’m talking about you should take me out for a drink at TRAFFIC in October and I’ll tell you a few stories that I’m not prepared to put in writing. Hopefully they will shock you into sensibility. .....needless to say they are a woeful tale of destruction.
Click machines and bots.
Seems pretty obvious but there are some scumbags out there that insist on building smarter and smarter click programs to defraud advertisers of their money. I’m really tired that there are still people in the world that think this is a good idea.
* I had a person talk to me recently that said that they could provide me with lots of business and that they could manage the click through rate to whatever we wanted. They’d built a smart click machine and saw no problem with this whatsoever. Go figure??????
* This type of activity is fraud and anyone doing this should end up in jail. I think that this summarises my position.
Identity theft
This is a serious problem that is impacting the domaining community whether individuals realise it or not.
* At ParkLogic we have received huge numbers of account applications from “people” that are not those people at all. We interview all those that make the first cut prior to accepting the account application and we have a raft of questions that attempt to verify the identity of the individual. Only around 2% of applications actually make it through this process. What I really don’t understand is the thought that the applicant is happy to lie to our face about who they are but still expects us to send thousands of dollars to them on the otherside of the world. How bazaar is that!
* Something to consider is that once an identity thief has stolen your Domaining persona what’s next?
* The days of “warm fuzzies” and “Joe” at parking company X knows me are over. For a start Joe probably no longer works there and Zhu Melcovi has just helped themselves to your reputation and identity without you even realising it. It's scary but true.
I’m not one to give Google or Yahoo a break because their lack of transparency is a huge issue for the industry but given the amount of questionable activities thrown at them on a daily basis I quite understand their position. It's clear that both Google and Yahoo are constantly battling against the tide of garbage pushed towards them.
Google and Yahoo I think that it's about time that the industry tries to give you both a hand. I'm willing to extend the olive branch and do whatever I can to assist in working to eliminate any bad traffic and clean up the industry. Please feel free to give me a call. :-)
The potential and incentives for fraud are huge and unscrupulous individuals have their snouts in the trough sucking up vast quantities of revenue that should be rightfully the good domainer. This means that the good domainers often find that their traffic has been devalued due to the scumbags of the industry.
Stay tuned for more thoughts on this topic.....you might have guessed that I'm pretty angry at the industry scumbags!
Disclaimer: For thos of you that don't know I'm one of the founders of ParkLogic.com. Please feel free to visit or go to the review on ParkLogic at dnjournal - click here.
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