|
When are we going to get standards our of the parking companies? I sometimes wonder if it would be faster to wait for hell to freeze over.
For example, have you ever tried to compare uniques at Domain Sponsor to uniques at Sedo? You get an entirely different answer. In fact, it really doesn't matter which parking company you choose, they'll all be different and each of them will claim that their method of counting is better than the other guys.
So what you might say, it's the revenue that's really important. So who cares how they count. Well, I care and I care a great deal and this is why.
Not surprisingly the domain parking industry has mirrored the Internet advertising Industry in its earlier years. There were many different online advertising solutions from a large range of companies all claiming to be better than the other guy. Sound familiar? The problem was that the advertisers (they are the guys forking out the cash) didn't understand the medium and didn't understand what were the subtle differences between each of the solutions being offered.
 Incredibly, back in 2000 the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) managed to get all of these intense competitors (Google, Yahoo, Double Click just to name a few) around the table and say, "let's make the pie bigger by making it simpler for the advertisers". After a bit of work these competitors managed to knock out a series of standards that are still in place today.
These standards allowed advertisers to understand what was going on and they responded by pouring advertising dollars into the Internet. Check out the attached graph and you can see the dramatic turn around in Internet advertising revenues that can largely be attributed to standards in online advertising.
Compare this to parking. There are no standards and there is no transparency or auditability - resulting in advertisers wondering if advertising on domains is actually worth while. The results of the standards in online advertising has been enormous and the potential is also there for parking but it's going to need real leadership. Maybe the ICA can help out with this? (ASIDE: While I'm at it can Hitfarm please stop parking http://www.internetcommerceassociation.com/ and can the owner of the domain please make a worthwhile donation for us all to the ICA....it's just a request.)
Without standards and auditability domainers may as well toss a coin each month to work out what they get paid. Heads, you get an increase in earnings, tails you don't. If anyone suggests that this is not the case then I'll ask them to prove it. Show me web logs and an external auditors certificate certifying a parking companies internal processes are "clean as a whistle" and I'll change my views.
The problem that's occurring is that parking companies basically say, "trust us, we'll pay you correctly" but at the same time they don't trust domainers, why, simply they can't afford to trust domainers. The result is why parking companies filter out a lot of the traffic through their anti-fraud systems etc. It's about time that both parking companies and domainers recognise that we are both in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship where it's in all of our interest to clean up the traffic and provide a proper justification to payments.
I've been an advocate of a "white list" of good domainers for quite some time. A "white list" domainer is one that immediately address any "suspect" traffic but are also rewarded with an economic insentive for being a "cut above" the others. At the moment the economic incentives are the other way around. People are rewarded for fraudulent traffic rather than clean traffic. There is not an incentive that essentially penalises the fraudulent domainer (and I use this word loosely for these guys!).
What do I want? Standards that will assist in increased advertising dollars flowing into our industry, auditability and accountability for parking companies and a "white list" of domainers. While I'm at it, Google and Yahoo need to have pressure brought upon them from the parking companies so that we can all have confidence in our economic models. There is literally billions of dollars at stake and we need to ensure that there is a strong financial justification backed up with auditable stats for why millions of additional dollars should flow into our industry. When this happens, we'll all get a lot richer :-)
Trackback(0)
|
Article Archive 
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
