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.

During this past week I’ve had an experience with a domain name that can only be described as a nightmare. I found myself with a domain stuck in a “no mans land” between two registrars, the registry and a bunch of crazy policies. So what happened?

The domain name in question was simcast.com and one that I have personally owned for nearly two decades. We’ve been building some really awesome tech at ParkLogic and decided to use this domain as the flagship lander for a lot of traffic. Since it was in my personal name, I decided to transfer it from my personal registrar account at Epik to the ParkLogic Enom account.

I should say that the ParkLogic Enom account only existed due to legacy reasons and I was just trying to tidy things up. During the testing process we discovered that the domain was no longer resolving for a growing number of nameservers…..one of which was Google’s public DNS. This wasn't a really good situation because if the domain went live we could be losing a lot of a traffic....plus one for testing!

I must admit that I’d never seen behaviour like what we were seeing before and assumed initially that it was due to some weird DNS propagation delays. I waited 24 hours and assumed the Internet would sort itself out. Things didn’t improve, in fact, they only got worse.

I contacted the Enom support desk and listened to really bad 80’s music for about 30 minutes while on hold. Seriously Enom, you really need to get some better music! The support person told me that despite what I could prove that everything was fine…..essentially they were clueless.

Last night I had the privilege of being in the audience for the play, “My Fretty Friend”. The entire performance was conducted by two actors and was absolutely hilarious while at the same time packing a punch about mental health. So why is it that this so was so special for me?

For a start, the two actors were my son Timothy and his wife Ruth. They wrote, acted, directed and produced the entire production. They backed themselves with their hard-earned cash, took the risk and decided to make the performing passion of their lives come to life on stage. I was so proud of them at multiple levels…..what I didn’t expect was just how impactful the show would be.

The play focused on a teenager named Amy who had severe anxiety problems. The character of Anxiety was brilliantly portrayed as Amy’s thoughts and this sense of getting an insight into how Amy was thinking was further enhanced by a rope linking both the characters.

I found the play helped me get a much deeper insight into what it means to suffer from anxiety. A surprise occurred when the character of depression was introduced after a school team sports star suffered a debilitating injury. This further opened what is often seen as the “taboo” subject of mental health.

During the performance the audience was laughing one minute, and the next I could see tears trickling down their face as the aspects of “anxiety” and “depression” took shape on the stage. The ninety minutes seemed to fly by as we became wrapped up in Amy’s journey of wrestling with her “Fretty Friend”.