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I recently read a thread in a forum where domainers were comparing the RPM rates for various categories of domains. It is a really interesting thread as in the spirit of co-operation domainers were sharing some pretty proprietary information.
 Everyone was using RPM (revenue per thousand uniques) as the measurement for the different categories of domains. For example, finance domains should earn $500 RPM compared to pets which are about $35 RPM. The problem with RPM as a measure is that uniques is an arbitrary concept which differs from one parking company to another. It is completely meaningless for conversations such as the one being had in the thread and this is very sad as there is no other measurement which available for us all use.
For example, domain sponsor throws away about 25% more traffic than Sedo due to the fact that they count a unique as an IP address every 24 hours while Sedo uses the measure of an IP address every 18 hours. This artificially increases the RPM value for all domain sponsor domains by about 25% while reducing the number of uniques.
So if I told you that my animals and pets domains had an RPM of $34 the first question you should ask is, "For what parking company?" If I then told you it was $34 RPM at Domain Sponsor then your $30 RPM Sedo figure is looking pretty good. If we were to convert the Domain Sponsor RPM to Sedo then we have to take the ratio of 18 hours / 24 hours which equals 0.75 and then multiply the $34 by this amount giving us $25.5 RPM normalised against Sedo. In this case Sedo wins, well not quite.
The problem with the ratio of 18 hours divided by 24 hours is that it assumes that the traffic for a domain and the number of unique IP addresses going to it is linear. This is not the case therefore it makes solving the conundrum harder still. The only way to measure the difference is to have a large sample of domains at both Sedo and Domain Sponsor and then swap them between each to measure the traffic differential.
As you can see there is no simple answer to RPM. At ParkLogic we gave up trying to normalise data and created our own RPM, known internally as the PL RPM. It's the only measurement that matters to us in our optimisation process. The unique component of this calculation is the number of uniques that we count and send to a parking company. We completely ignore their own reported uniques.
Without clearly understanding uniques you can point a domain to one parking company and they tell you that it has 10 uniques per day and when you point it to another parking company and they may tell you it has 100! On a domain by domain basis the differential can be staggering. This become very problematic for domainers that are testing if a domain has traffic by pointing it to a parking company.
There is no common ground to compare parking companies unless you are using actual URL hits. I've been trying to campaign for standards in parking companies for a long time now as it brings security in measurement for both domainers and advertisers. The whole idea is that more advertisers will choose our channel if there are clear measurement standards brought into place. You've only got to take a look at what happened to the online advertising industry as soon as standards were introduced to know that they are a good thing!
So don't be fooled by the rhetoric of some of the parking companies. Sure, they're doing their best but working as an industry we can all do better.
Wiki: Domain Sponsor, Sedo, ParkLogic
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