Nucite Network

I mentioned in a previous post that due to foobar being a common placeholder name, there are a ton of daily emails sent to the address foo@bar.com.  The fact is, due to that same situation, there are also a number of inbound links to both bar.com/foo and foo.bar.com.  Most of these are coming in from forum posts where programmers are communicating concepts with one another.  I threw up a simple page that asked "What were you expecting to see here?" along with a Google AdSense search box at foo.bar.com.  I also redirected traffic from bar.com/foo to the same spot.  I really just wanted to see how much traffic it actually got... and where the traffic was coming from.  Turns out, not a big deal.  About 5 - 10 people a day were coming through to those 2 URLs.

The owner of Bar.com and I talked about the email situation and he told me the brief story of the foo, which has recently replaced the simple search page.  Because most programmer geeks would probably find it interesting (or at least mildly entertaining), we did a Digg and a Reddit for the new page.  The Digg got absolutely no traction, but the Reddit took off fast and landed a link on the home page there for about an hour.  And it was at the top of the Geek category there for just over a day.  There was a 24 hour time period there where that domain got about 5,000 unique visitors.  And since that day, we're now averaging about 50 visitors to that page.

I made this post just to communicate how much of an impact a simple post to these social bookmarking-type services can have.  Now if we could only do the same for the money making pages...

Have you noticed that Google tends to sit back, watch which industries flourish online and then jumps into the market with their own solution?  It makes sense.  Given the fact that they not only control the vast majority of online searches as well as the advertisements displayed via websites (and parked domain pages), they were bound to eventually enter the paid parking space.  And now anyone with an AdSense account (and a domain they want to park) can give this new platform a try.

I do quite a bit of interaction with the AdSense platform, and figured I'd take it for a test drive with the following domains, which each get less than 100 type-ins per month:

DupageCountyLaw.com
CrackiPhone.com

My first impression of the system is that it could get confusing for many domain holders.  Rather than simply setting nameservers (like we're all used to), the AdSense platform forces you to manually alter A and CNAME records for each domain you park with this service.  If you host with someone like GoDaddy, this could be a very tedious process if you want to try it out for a couple hundred domains since they only (currently) allow you to alter one name at a time in this way.  It only take about 2 minutes once you're in the system there, but that time can add up fast in larger numbers.  On the other hand, Moniker allows you to make these changes in bulk, so those customers there will probably have a better experience.  Those are the only two registrars I tried.

Earnings predictions?  Well, I figure two things should happen:

1) Google's quality score for your domain should go up, so your value per click should rise.
2) You'll be getting 100% of your total earnings per click, so you're earnings should rise yet again.

And just a rant on #1 above: I don't understand why quality scores are so low on parked domains in the first place.  I'm involved with sites where raw type-in traffic provides conversions at rates as high as 1,000% better than organic search traffic... with proof that the type-in customer has never been to that site before (for those who quickly thought of this rebuttal).

It's tough to say at this point whether or not Google will be putting existing players in this market out of business, but it's certain to have a negative affect on the bottom line of most of them over the coming months.  Time will tell.  But if Google does what they seem to do best (analyze - improve, analyze - improve), we're sure to hear belly aching from the likes of the parking companies we're all used to working with.