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A critical challenge with optimising domain names at a parking company is often hidden from most domainers. Some of the fluctuations that occur are not the result of natural seasonal movements in the EPC (Earnings Per Click) price but have more to do with the fact that all of your domains are in the same pool of revenue at the parking company as everyone else's.
 For instance, let's imagine that you've been diligently making sure that you only have quality traffic, making wise purchases and cleaning up trademarks etc. This would be typically regarded as a higher quality portfolio. Now remember that your domains are with everyone else's. Another domainer may have a completely different strategy, thereby polluting the pool of revenue and quality that you've meticulously created with trademark infringing, virus related, fraudulent traffic that manages to avoid being detected by the "anti-bad traffic systems".
What then occurs is like magic, your revenue declines as the smart pricing algorithms go to work on the whole pool of domains. The EPC is adjusted downwards due the influx of poorly performing traffic.
Mike Robertson of Fabulous describes this phenomenon:
 "Most people are familiar with Google and Yahoo's quality scores and how they award/penalize traffic depending on the quality of traffic/conversions to their advertisers. We have been told by our upstream partner that our traffic is of the best quality and therefore we are compensated accordingly.
If we were to make our parking program more readily available, we would jeopardize our quality score and ultimately this would affect revenue generated by those using our parking program."
One of the reasons why Fabulous is so paranoid about what traffic it takes into it's network is because it wants to increase margins by having their quality score higher than other parking companies. This makes complete sense, although they may also lose a lot of traffic. The most interesting point in this quotation is the fact that the quality score indicates that everyone's revenue is dependent upon everyone else's traffic.
What can you do about this problem? Not much really unless your parking company is prepared to put you on a Google/Yahoo feed that is exclusive to your portfolio. Unless you're a very large customer this is unlikely to happen as the parking companies only receive a limited number "hooks" into Google/Yahoo that allow them to isolate portfolios.
The lesson to learn is that many of the fluctuations that you see in your domains have actually nothing to do with the optimisation process and more to do with other people's lack of optimisation.
Wiki: Mike Robertson, Fabulous
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