In this blog I’m going to be a little like Rick Schwartz and have a rant. Many domain investors make the mistake of assuming that domain parking is dead and the only real business model is available to them is domains sales. Is domain parking dead? No, it’s not dead but for a growing number of investors it’s morphed into something a lot more sophisticated.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of traditional domain parking is that behind all the smoke and mirrors lies Google. Google buys a lot of the domain traffic because they have a huge breadth of advertisers. If you have a website that is about "Norwegian Knitting" then it’s likely Google can put relevant advertisements on the page.

The weakness of traditional domain parking is that Google has manoeuvred itself into an unassailable position and has then exploited this position by continually reducing pay-outs. Domain investors shouldn’t be surprised by this behaviour as it’s economically rational in a world that is driven by quarterly earnings calls….so stop complaining and just get over it.

Notice what I said earlier…..Google buys a lot of the traffic. Just because Google is wanting to buy your traffic doesn’t mean you have to sell everything to them. It would be far more sensible to only sell to Google what Google is paying fairly for and then sell to other people what they want to pay more for.

What I've found is the majority of domainers are like a person selling a bucket full of oranges. The buyer (ie. Google) asks if you can throw in your car with the deal and with a grateful smile you say “yes”. In fact, it’s a bit worse than that. Domain investors are selling oranges and Google takes the car without asking because they believe they deserve it. Remember they still only paid orange prices for your car.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my new burgeoning business and I thought that it was about time I updated everyone with how it’s going. To say I’ve been busy is a bit of an understatement but first, let me provide you with a quick recap.

Early this year I set myself the challenge of launching a new venture and it was an instant success with the target market. I had customers flocking in from all over the place wanting to get access to the services I was providing.

I then wrote about the fact that I planned on tackling a new target market. This is quite often a risky proposition for a new business as the expenditure of stretched resources could end up disrupting existing clients and sending the whole venture bankrupt.

I just knew in my gut that this new segment wasn’t being served adequately and with no market research whatsoever I decided to push into the unknown. After tweaking my services, a number of times I’m pleased to inform readers that it’s been a great success!

Of course, the business I’m talking about is about how to attract birds (the flying variety) to my yard and more importantly just out my study window. As can be seen from the above photo I’ve managed to get a flock of cockatoos as customers and one of them even allowed me to handfeed it.

I must admit it was a surreal moment as I slowly crept up to the beautiful bird and extended my hand with some seed in it. It felt like a complete endorsement of my whole business model….and that’s often what success is all about.

So what lessons did I learn along this perilous journey? For a start, when something wasn’t working I changed things up. For instance, the bird bath wasn’t in the right position and my fine feathered customers were ignoring it, so I moved it to a new location. Voila! Suddenly I had customers dive bombing the water in an effort to avail themselves of the service I was offering.

I received an email the other day inviting me to spend some time on a panel at a conference discussing the impact that Zero Click has had on the domain monetisation industry. It should be said that I like data…..touchy feely stuff is all well and good but getting a return from your domain investments is all about getting dirty in the numbers.

First of all….what is zero-click? Zero-click advertising networks bid in real-time to get access to traffic. In the case of ParkLogic, there may be a dozen or more companies bidding for each piece of traffic every hundred milliseconds or so. The winning bid must outbid every other bidder AND also the best traditional parking solution to receive the traffic. This is all good news for domain investors.

So after receiving the email about the conference I decided to do a dumpster dive into the data and out popped the following chart about the impact Zero Click advertising networks have had on domain monetisation. The data goes from 1 November 2017 to 25 July 2018. I should say that we deal with many traditional parking solutions and zero-click companies and the numbers are aggregate of all of these.

 
The chart comprises of three lines with two trend lines on the orange and grey series. The orange line represents the percentage of revenue that is now going to zero click companies and uses the right-hand axis. The trend is clear….it’s headed upwards.

For the last thirty-six hours I’ve been in a state of wifelessness. It just so happens that Roselyn went away on Friday afternoon to attend a conference with one hundred and sixty other women. It’s fair to say that when the cats been away the mouse has been playing…..playing some old school PC games that is!

Just to reassure you, I made sure that I wore an appropriately dejected face as I kissed her good-bye and watched her drive off into the sunset. Once I was sure it was safe that I was out of her view I threw a few fist pumps into the air and immediately texted a bunch of friends that the LAN party was on!

Some may mistakenly believe that LAN stands for Ladies Away Night but in reality, it’s actually, Local Area Network. For those of you that have not experienced the joy of hosting a LAN party then let me assure you that it really should be on your bucket list.

At a LAN party everyone brings their laptops (used to be desktops but they’re just a pain to carry around), plugs them into a router and downloads whatever game we plan on playing.

Before the frivolity begins, drinks are brought out (always makes the evening better), pizzas ordered, and copious amounts of junk food littered around the table. Basically, we're systematically loading our bodies with as much sugar as we can possibly take so that we're wired for the nights entertainments.

So after we devoured the necessary calories we fired up Quake Arena 3. For those of you that don’t know what Quake is then I suggest you tear up whatever degree you have earned at college and get a real education. Quake was the foundation stone upon which all other first-person shooters have been built. If you like Call of Duty or Gears of War then you have Quake to thank for that.

For quite some time now I’ve been digging through the different domain development platforms to determine which one is best. Is it Joomla? Wordpress? Or how about Weebly or Wix? What I’ve found is that they all fall short for domain investors.

Developing a domain into a business is one of the four principle business models that domain investors use to extract value from their assets. The other three are monetising domain traffic, selling domains as stock items and selling domains as high value items.

Each of the development platforms are excellent for building a single website but what I've continued to find is they still fall down is when a person tries to build more than one. Although it’s quite simple to spin up another instance in any of the platforms it takes a long time to set them all up…..and time is money.

Anyone that has embarked down the development path learns that building a single domain into a business is a challenging task…let alone many domains. Once you get over the hurdle of building a few websites you quickly discover that there isn’t a simple way to view how each of them are performing in their various business models.

Although Google Analytics provides some insight into your traffic the cost of using it for domain investors can be prohibitive. What are the costs on this “free” product? Do you honestly think that by providing Google end-to-end visibility on your traffic that they won’t take advantage of the data? Let me give you a hint, at its heart Google is an analytics company….. I think Google has enough of my businesses information without handing over the crown jewels for free.