This week we saw a continuing of the trend that was established in the previous week’s data. Both Google and direct advertisers are beginning to stabilize their payouts with a slight growth in the overall monetization industry compared to the previous week.

Earnings per Click and Click Through Rate are doing their regular counter-cyclical dance as once goes up the other goes down. This is more of an artifact of smart pricing algorithms rather than actual user or advertiser behaviour.

What’s going to be interesting in the coming weeks is to see what happens to the normalized RPM as the big corporate advertisers come back online. Over the last 10 weeks the small to medium sized businesses have flocked online to try to sell….well….anything. This has kept the payout rates up but with the corporates coming out of hibernation anything is possible.

I spend some time in the last part of the video taking another look at a real, live case that is being optimized by ParkLogic. It’s real data, for a real client and I think you’re going to love it as I unpack what is going on at various traffic levels.

Don’t forget to like the video, leave comments and pass it onto other investors. Keep safe.

After last week’s video I thought that we were about to enter a downturn for the domain Pay-Per-Click industry. The data was looking a little daunting but what a difference a week can make!

In this video I unpack what’s happened across this last week and do a comparison of direct advertisers versus Google. What the numbers clearly display is if you’re not exposed to the direct advertising market then you’re really missing out on a big increase in revenue.

This series of videos show a detailed picture of the domain monetization industry on a week by week basis. They are not to be missed so don’t forget to subscribe, like and pass them on to a friend that may need to get some additional insights with their domain investments.

Once again, we must not forget that in amongst all the analysis there are people really suffering as a result of COVID-19. Don’t forget to give a friend a call to encourage them while they’re in lock-down, have a family zoom session or just text a friend to let them know you’re thinking about them.

This past week saw Google announce a slowdown in the growth of their online advertising business. At ParkLogic, we have seen increased volatility and what looks like the beginnings of a contraction after a period of rapid growth in normalized RPM. What does all this mean for domain investors?

In this video I discuss the broader online advertising industry and a key statement that the CFO of Google released that suggests a more turbulent future. There appears to be a tussle between big business that has largely exited the online space and the rapid rise in small to medium enterprizes entering the market in search of new customers.

In addition to the regular slides I’ve being discussing each week I’ve added several more that show some of the trends on a weekday basis. These are absolutely fascinating to unpack and reveal some great weekly trends for investors to take advantage.

I am for the data I provide in the videos to provide a clear picture of what is happening in the online advertising space with the goal that it will help you to making better decisions for your business. Don’t forget to subscribe, like or sign-up for the push alerts so you don’t miss out on future blogs/videos.

Understanding how targeted advertising works is a critical part of how domain traffic is monetised. In this article I’m going to attempt to unpack online advertising and to help shed some light in what has changed over the years.

Back in about 2002, when I first started investing in domains, I made sure that every one of my domains had an appropriate keyword attached to it. I had an underlying assumption that keywords influenced the advertising results and ultimately user behaviour via the click-through-rate (CTR). This approach seemed quite logical and I spent hours researching each domain and setting an appropriate keyword.

I remember attending a conference and hypothesized with the Google domain team that just because you owned pizza.com doesn’t mean the advertising should be about pizzas. I suggested that with an appropriate amount of research I discovered the advertising should be about raising a loan to start a pizza shop.

This was a hypothetical situation (I didn’t own pizza.com) but it did illustrate the importance of researching domains. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was actually crossing the boundary between context sensitive advertising (ie. domain content) and psychographic targeting (ie. the user).