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Parking Income Down - Has it Hit Bottom?
Most of us have seen parking income drop in 2008. The decrease has not been obvious on all domains, but portfolio averages are down. Google AdWord and Yahoo/Overture ad rates don’t seem to have decreased on most search terms, so there is speculation that Google and Yahoo may be keeping a bit more of the income. There is no way to really verify this, of course.
Dark Blue Sea, the parent company of Fabulous, reported a decline in domain revenue of almost 50% from first quarter 2007 to first quarter 2008. Tucows is perhaps best known as a shareware resource, but they are also a bulk domain registrar and the owner of 150,000 domain names. They reported in August that their revenue from domain parking dropped 12% in one quarter. Their CEO, Elliot Noss also said that parking revenue may have hit bottom. Noss believes that “Google and Yahoo have pushed back on the payouts, they have also started to get more aggressive with some of the grayer parts of the market and long-term that affects us positively because we’ve got a very clean book of business. The more sort of bad traffic and bad clicks that are pushed out of the system, the better it is for us in the long-term.”
