According to this article on TechCrunch, Yahoo! will be running a two week test to include Google Ads in 3% of their search result advertising. While this might be part of a strategy for their negotiations with Microsoft, it also serves as a painful reminder for the domain industry. Domain monetization options are basically limited to working with Google and Yahoo! or one of their aggregation partners. Should one of the two companies start relying on the other, there would only be one partner to work with.

Domain name parking company Skezno announced via an email to partners today that they have received a minority stake investment from the Ashmore Group. The company release which has been copied below had not made it to either businesses website at the time of this writing.

Skenzo, a leading provider of technology, in the traffic monetization business, today announced the completion of a significant minority investment from the Ashmore Group. The Ashmore Group is one of the world’s leading Investment Firms managing funds over US$36.5 billion.

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Forgive me for missing out on the obvious additional misuse of another racist domain name, Niggers.com which is owned by the “Anti Hate Association” and currently is displaying a parking page by Sedo. Is the Anti Hate Association aware of how their domain is being used?

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As per an email we just received from Parked.com, Yahoo! has warned the parking companies using a Yahoo! feed that they need to enforce the anti-arbitrage (”no paid traffic”) rules in the future.

Parked.com had been the only parking company we were aware of that was able to allow small targeted amounts of arbitraged traffic.

The email references the parked.com terms of service:

“All other types of traffic including bought traffic, traffic driven by PPC campaigns, traffic directed from hyperlinks are not permitted. If your traffic originates from any sources other than type-in and search engine traffic, you will not be entitled to payment as per this Agreement. Regular checks are carried out and we reserve the right to suspend any domain from our Service at any time, on our sole discretion, if we reasonably believe that you have violated this Agreement; for example, if we suspect that the traffic on your domain is bought, generated or redirected in any way that contravenes these terms and conditions.”

The email goes on to say:

Accordingly, all arbitrage must stop effective 1pm PST on Thursday, February 14, 2008. Even though arbitrage will no longer be allowed, all accounts will still be paid.

With more and more feed providers being very strict about the quality of traffic, it appears that re-registered expired domains might be a future target of similar changes. Most of the parking companies’ agreements state that traffic that originates from hyperlinks is not acceptable either.

According to an article by DomainNameWire, Ask.com is to stop syndicating the google advertising feed to parking providers.

Domain Name Wire has learned through multiple sources that Ask.com’s Google feed will no longer be syndicated to parking companies as of March 1. A number of parking companies use this feed to augment other search results. I know that Parked.com uses it for traffic to some foreign companies, and apparently HitFarm and Skenzo use this feed as well.

Ask.com had also recently dropped a large part of their domain parking deals.

Moniker announced today that all of their Domain Parking customers in the TrafficClub program are to be moved to DomainSponsor.

From the announcement email: Due to other opportunities and future enhancements to our domain monetization strategy, we have decided to fully migrate all TrafficClub services to DomainSponsor effective January 31. On that day, we will convert customer accounts automatically to DomainSponsor.

[via The Domains]

After the recent purchase of Moniker by Oversee.net, Skenzo has now announced that they will no longer be offering their monetization to customer’s of Moniker’s TrafficClub domain parking platform. They posted the following note on their website:

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New details in the Vulcan Golf vs Google case have emerged. Several new plaintiffs have been added to the case against Google, Oversee, Sedo, IReit and other “John Does”. Most notable of the new plaintiffs is a famous sports star, Vincent E. Jackson, aka “Bo” Jackson.

Bo Jackson is a recognized name within American professional sports. Jackson is best known as an All Star player in two major league sports, the NFL and the MLB. His name became famous in the late 80s and early 90s when Nike began the famous “Bo Knows” ad campaign.

Jackson’s portion of the claim states that:

Bo Jackson has suffered and continues to suffer injury to his person, business and property as a direct and proximate result of the Deceptive Domain Scheme and violations set forth herein. The injury and damage suffered is economic and non-economic in nature, and includes but is not limited to: diversion of business; confusion, damage to reputation; dilution of distinctive and valuable famous name; loss of revenue; and other such related injury and damage

Two specific domains were mentioned in Jackson’s portion of the claim : aintnobojackson.com and nobojackson.com. Both domains are registered with Whois privacy protection and currently appear to redirect to Sedo, but are not resolving or being monetized. Sedo and Google were named as the defendants.

The Vulcan case continues to have interesting twists and turns and I’m sure will add more plaintiffs and maybe even new defendants as the case plays out. To see the documents and history of the case in there entirety, check the Justia website.

Special thanks to George Kirikos for the tip

A recent press release from Oversee.net – parent company of DomainSponsor - read, Low.com has launched a brand-new client interface - LeadMatch.com, essentially a self-serve mortgage lead portal that exclusively devoted to the brokers and loan officers community. Build on the expertise and technology of Low.com, LeadMatch™ would be matching the qualified consumers, looking for mortgage loans, with the brokers and individual loan officers.

Being a new lead platform, the portal would enable the brokers and loan officers to access thousands of high quality mortgage leads in real-time. Further, the user-friendly, web-based interface would help the users to have complete control over their leads. The brokers and loan officers would be able to define the kind of leads they need and determine when to receive them individually. With a reduced marketing cost and increased ROI, the platform is set to streamline the customers’ acquisition.

The leads are advertised on the high profile consumer sites such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo! Finance, and eBay. The leads from LeadMatch are generated from high quality traffic sources, which offer high quality leads as well as positive consumer experience. The real-time leads can be seen via e-mail using a lead management system or through the LeadMatch interface.

For creating an account, the investment is as low as $500. As the account is opened, it can be refined using a set of filters (loan amount, LTV, state, loan type and credit rating). The brokers and the loan officers are capable of scheduling the lead delivery days, and determining the daily lead volumes. Those users lacking experience of buying online leads can access LeadMatch consultants to seek advice on the process.

According to Steve Yi, Vice President of Marketing Services at Oversee.net and General Manager of Low.com, “We developed LeadMatch with these issues in mind, and are committed to helping our customers succeed in this challenging market. Brokers and loan officers will find unique value in LeadMatch’s quality, convenience, and flexibility.”

[via: Inside Domaining]

I guess it is about time for our coverage from Domain Roundtable to conclude, but here is one more presentation I would like to share with you. It’s from a panel about monetization options and was created by Joe Davis of TechAnalyst.com. Joe has a lot of experience with CPA models. I would like to especially direct your attention to slide 6 of his presentation, which gives you an idea of what you might be leaving on the table.