In this series of articles, I plan on sharing my insights into RPM and how this metric has impacted all our lives in the domain industry over the last decade. I hope you enjoy the articles as much as I have writing them.

For those of you that are unaware, RPM means Revenue Per Thousand Visitors. I find that very few people understand how this universally accepted measurement term is calculated and how it can vary from one provider to another. During the following articles I will be referring to how RPM has shaped the history of the domain industry….

Most people would be aware of the formula for a domain’s RPM looks like the one below:

This looks simple enough until you begin to dig into it. The reality is that a sustainable market RPM formula it looks something more akin to the following:

People often describe their hectic lives of racing around for other people, having too much to do in too short a time or dealing with difficult relationships as stressful. They would be exactly right. Earlier this year I found myself maxed out by stress and it wasn’t a good place to be.

I’ve experienced quite a number of stressful times in my life with varying levels of intensity. For example, many years ago, when I was told that a $1.5 million payment was not coming, I found myself under a lot of stress. What was really strange was the stress I recently experienced far exceeded that event and yet, it didn’t involve any money at all.

The crazy thing is that when you’re going through a lot of stress, you’ll convince yourself that your decision making is spot on and your behaviour towards others is perfect. Nothings changed right? Wrong!

What was I doing? I hadn’t been walking around the house in a rage, or yelling at the kids….I’d done something almost worse than that, I’d retreated into silence. I may as well not have been at the meal table each night as I silently ate dinner while my mind raced through all the myriad of things I was juggling. What I realise now is that it was terrible for the rest of the family to watch me as I closed off towards them.

About 8 years ago I wrote an article outlining many of the aspects of domain traffic monetisation that really frustrated me and what needed to be done to overcome them. Don’t get me wrong, I love monetising domain traffic but in its current form it’s both a blessing and a curse.

One of the really nice things about traditional parking is that it’s easy to implement. You set your nameservers, pray for a click and watch the money roll on it. This also makes domain parking incredibly scalable. You don’t have to worry about anything other than getting more domains and hoping Google doesn’t decide to exit the business.

As one of the founders of ParkLogic, we took this to the next level by putting a real-time auction system for each piece of traffic reaching a domain. The goal of this approach was to extract the maximum amount of value from the domain traffic and then compensate the domain owners accordingly. This worked and revenue increases of 80% not out of the realm of possibility.

Despite a great result I was still annoyed about the fact that traffic monetisation involved everyone hoping for clicks to generate revenue and then throwing the users away. It just seemed a silly business model that was leaving a lot of money on the table.

Once again, I find myself sitting in the Qantas Club waiting for my international flight connection to head to Singapore and apTLD. The first thing that many of you will be asking is what the heck is apTLD? apTLD stands for Asia Pacific Top Level Domains.

I’ve been asked to speak at apTLD and to fly the domain investor flag to the ccTLD registries that will be present. Many of these registries don’t even know that domain investing exists so it should be an interesting education for both them and me.

I must admit that since it’s a short, day flight (only 8 hours), I’m looking forward to getting some work done, have a rest and generally let the world go by. The magic of noise cancelling headphones will block out the planes engines as well as the tap, tap, tap of my fingers on the keyboard.

This is the first trip for me after the northern hemisphere hiatus and I’m really looking forward to catching up with old friends and having a chat about business. I’ve always found that during July and August it’s a great time to do some development work rather than chase people who would much rather being enjoying the sunshine.

What’s your health worth? This is an interesting question that typically gets the response, “everything!” It’s when you begin to drill down on it that you soon discover that “everything” is actually a negotiable concept for most people.

I was speaking to a person recently that was on a fast train to some major health issues due to their lifestyle choices. I suggested that they may consider making some changes to what they were doing so they don't run into the brick wall of a medical crisis that many people experience.

I asked them the question, “What’s your health worth to you?” They replied, “everything” and then proceeded to negotiate what they should and should not eat to help them get healthier. I then asked them why they felt that their health was a negotiation, and this pulled them up short.

Too many people view their health as a negotiation. For many years I did exactly that. I justified how much exercise I didn’t do and shoved food into my mouth no matter what the nutritional value. It was a crazy way to live and was damaging my body as it tried to cope with the abuse.

I’ve never believed in diets as I always had the view that as soon as you go off them you put the weight back on again. This meant that I had to make the difficult decision to make a lifestyle change. It was gradual at first but slowly but surely, I did more exercise, ate better and got into balance the different aspects of my life.