12|13|2012 12:38 pm EDT
Team Internet just posted a promotional for their ParkingCrew subsidiary video on their Facebook page that explains the company history.
It’s quite entertaining, so go and watch it now:
11|21|2012 10:54 am EDT
As announced on the Elephant Traffic website, Team Internet, parent company of ParkingCrew has purchased the customers and brand from Elephant Traffic as of November 16th, 2012. The traffic publishers of Elephant Traffic will be migrated to ParkingCrew where they now have access to the following features:
Advertisers on Elephant Traffic will be migrated to DNTX.com, which allows them to benefit from:
The two companies had been working together already for a year.
07|25|2012 05:08 pm EDT
The company’s domain parking pages were accidentally blocked by an anti-virus software earlier this year
Oversee.net announced today that its domain parking unit DomainSponsor has entered into an agreement with Team Cymru, a specialized Internet security research firm and non-profit dedicated to making the Internet more secure by helping organizations identify and eradicate problems in their network.
Given the size and scope of its DomainSponsor traffic monetization network, the company sees itself in a uniquely advantageous position to help detect and identify potentially malicious communications to share via its relationship with Team Cymru to benefit the wider Internet Security Community.
According to Oversee.net’s CEO Debra Domeyer, the company “want[s] to support their efforts to help other companies avoid network problems caused by malware and to help users have a safer online experience.”
Earlier this year in May, an author by the name of EarlGrey wrote on Syndk8.com that Oversee.net’s domain parking subsidiary DomainSponsor had been “hacked” and was “spreading malware“. The report turned out to be a false alarm, as confirmed by Oversee.net’s VP of Marketing & Communications, Aaron Kvitek, and a comment posted by the original author. The company’s domain parking pages had accidentally been blocked by an anti-virus software and Oversee.net was able to work with the vendor to remove the block.
See the full press release after the jump.
03|30|2012 04:37 pm EDT
Marchex operated a domain parking program through their MDNH subsidary by the name of Marchex Sitebox. The program started in 2006 and is now being shut down as of May 1st, 2012 according to an email sent out today by the company. The website has not been updated at this time, however the application to join the program links to an error page.
See the full email after the jump.
03|02|2012 02:50 pm EDT
According to a press release just issued by Oversee.net, Scott Morrow left the company and Debra Domeyer was named CEO. Scott Morrow and Debra Domeyer were just named co-CEOs on January 30th of this year. Debra was CTO of Oversee.net since 2008. According to the press release Scott Morrow “has decided to leave the company to pursue other interests.” Just at the DOMAINfest Global in Santa Monica, which ended February 2nd the two were introduced to the press as co-CEOs.
02|22|2012 03:36 pm EDT
Google sent out a message today to publishers using Adsense for Domains. After nearly 4 years of running the program, the company has decided to discontinue their hosted Adsense for Domains on undeveloped domain names. The company is recommending migrating your domain names to a parking company.
Domainers relished the release of the Adsense for Domains program as a possible way to “cut out the middle man” and bypass the parking companies, but most domainers who spoke with DNN have found that the program provided no additional benefits.
One part of the announcement that seems puzzling, Google claims that the “benefits to our partner network” don’t make sense to continue, yet Google recommends switching to parking domains through a parking company that uses a Google feed. Google is in essence including the middle-man in this scenario. The parking companies may be adding the benefit of aggregation, optimization and fraud screening that Google does not handle, but it would seem that this skill-set is in Google’s “wheelhouse” . After 4 years they could have easily handled these tasks if not great improved upon the optimization and screening already being done by smaller players.
See the full message from Google after the jump.
09|22|2011 03:12 pm EDT
Inspired by Elliot Silver, who pointed out an article in the Wall Street Journal where the author (a reporter for the Associated Press) sent an email to his friend and mistyped the domain “VerizonWireless.com” by leaving out the “m” at the end. Apparently he received an auto-response trying to get him to click through an affiliate link.
Here’s a real-life example of how it works: An Associated Press reporter accidentally sent a message to a “verizonwireless.co” address instead of the proper “.com” and got this response, ostensibly from his contact “tom”:
“I am out of office right now on a my (sic) dream vacation and will get back to you when I return. If you don’t hear from me, my assistant should contact you shortly. You should check this site to see how I scored the best travel deal for my trip.”
That’s followed by a link to a site that advertises luxury resorts. Presumably, the owner of verizonwireless.co makes money when someone clicks through to any of the resort sites.
It appears that the domain VerizonWireless.co used to be parked at Bodis, but currently does not resolve and according to the article some other sites stopped sending replies like this as well when the AP reporters inquired about them. Quite a bit of good research for the article, since they are even explaining how domain parking works. DNN tested a few domains that are parked on Bodis and appear to have a high potential for email address typos, but none of them was set up to receive email.
The whole concept reminds of the Reply Cycle project launched in 2008. As it appears this project is not currently active any more, as their website appears to be down.
09|14|2011 09:50 am EDT
DirectI, the parent company of BigJumbo, DomainAdvertising.com, Logicboxes and ResellerClub amongst others has announced today with an email to its customers that it will be merging the DomainAdvertising and BigJumbo brands.
From the email:
DomainAdvertising.com is pleased to announce today, the merger of BigJumbo.com & DomainAdvertising.com into a single Domain Parking Platform. The merged entity will function under the brand DomainAdvertising.com.
This merger combines the best features from each of the platforms, further strengthens our position in the domain parking market. The move brings with it a gamut of advantages and possibilities – the combination of DomainAdvertising.com’s graphic-rich, topical templates and BigJumbo.com’s superior keyword optimization technology, more resources on the account management and optimization front, greater industry insights and access to more intelligence– just to name a few.
According to the login details email sent out to customers, it seems that Domain Advertising.com will also continue to accept traffic via URL forwarding.
DomainAdvertising was launched at the Targeted T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show in New York in 2009 and then hired former Fabulous.com executive Dan Warner as a CEO. He left the company at the end of June 2011.
See the full email after the jump.
(more…)
08|17|2011 04:34 am EDT
According to an email sent by domain parking company TrafficZ last night, Yahoo! has introduced a daily revenue cap for parked domains in the .biz, .co, .info, .tv and .us TLDs. If a domain exceeds the revenue cap, no more paid Yahoo! ads will be displayed on the domain for another three days.
Unfortunately the announcement does not reveal the revenue cap, which could potentially be determined on a per domain basis. I would expect the parking companies that are on a Yahoo! feed to either a) implement a backup feed for those TLDs or b) ensure that a backup feed is used once Yahoo! ceases to deliver ads for those domains.
[Update]: We now have a confirmation from Parked.com & WhyPark.com that this restriction was also imposed on their Yahoo! feed. Craig Rowe told DNN via email: “Yes, this is affecting our Yahoo feed as well, and all Yahoo domain match feeds. In our case, when the capping kicks in, we backfill the domain with ads from second-tier feeds. So, it’s not that a domain will make no money, but rather it’ll earn less from those ads. ”
[Update2]: TrafficZ sent another update on Aug 17, offering “TrafficZ clients with exceptional .INFO, .US, .TV, .BIZ and/or .CO domains” to submit those domains to their account team for further review. The email goes on to say that “where appropriate, TrafficZ will work with Yahoo! to have revenue cap limits raised or removed from qualified domains, regardless of TLD“.
See the full note mailed by TrafficZ after the jump.
05|28|2011 12:57 am EDT
As reported by Symantec a few days ago, many parked domains have the chance to end up on a blocking list due to spammers abusing a security hole in the parking company’s redirect structure.
Symantec: “We have automatically blocked tens of thousands of these domains.”
While the post on Symantec’s official blog does not reveal the affected parking services, quick tests on three services revealed that at least two of them were vulnerable to the exploit. The spammers found a way to use the click tracking in the URL of the parking service to modify the target address by creating a link that contains their own URL. One of the services we found used Base64 encoding, whereas the other one simple used a URLencoded address.
Nick Johnston from Symantec recommends that the parking companies check the refer(r)er URL or add additional hashing to their redirect URLs.
[Update]: One of the domain parking system operators we identified and notified has informed us that a fix will be in place shortly.
[Thank you Hennie]
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