A couple of weeks ago we published a press release from DomainHoldings.com about their Monitization Decision Engine (MDE). At the time DH promised they would be releasing a case study to back up their claims.
Today DomainHoldings.com released details a the results of a 30 day test on its “DomainPower Montization Decision Engine (MDE)” comparing it to a pure PPC provider on almost 10,000 domain names.
According to DH the revenue of the total portfolio of about 10K domains, increased 46% after 7 days and 91% after 30 days.
Here are the details;
“”The following Case Study illustrates the methodology and test results of a 9,873 domain portfolio, known as Portfolio X, utilizing Tier 1 PPC advertisers vs. using DomainPower Montization Decision Engine (MDE) technology over a 30-day period. Over the course of the 30-day test, Portfolio X saw a 91% revenue increase as a result of switching to the MDE.
Meet Portfolio X
Portfolio X consisted of 9,873 domains spread across more than 40 different categories with traffic from 137 different countries. Prior to the MDE launch, all domains were pointed to landing pages monetized through a “Tier 1″ PPC upstream provider (illustrated below).
Portfolio X Category Composition
As the pie chart below illustrates, Portfolio X had an even category composition, with domains across all major verticals. Among categories in “Other” are: Kids, Vehicles, International, Government, Art and Food.
Portfolio X Traffic By Country
U.S. Based traffic accounted for slightly more than 55% of all traffic to Portfolio X.
Introduction to Monetization Decision Engine (MDE)
The MDE technology allows domains and traffic to be clustered by similar attributes and routed to external partners. Revenue from partners is measured until the MDE identifies the rotation with the highest yield.
The hypothesis was that the MDE would offer higher revenue almost immediately due to prior optimization of the clusters and revenue would continue to increase as a result of continuous optimization.
Monetization Partners
Portfolio X’s traffic was routed amongst 31 total DomainPower monetization partners, whose methods ranged from PPC to CPA to zero-click.
Test Results
For this study, Portfolio X’s 9,873 domains were switched to the MDE on January 10. Results were measured over the course of three different intervals. The red represents the trailing revenue over pre-MDE date ranges. The blue represents post-MDE revenue over the same number of days. There is a two-day gap between periods to account for DNS propagation. The percentages indicate the lift from pre- and post-MDE revenue stats.
Conclusion
Our hypothesis was correct in that the MDE increased Portfolio X’s revenue almost immediately, showing a 46% lift in the first seven days. Over time, the lift steadily increased as the MDE optimized, eventually reaching 91% over a 30-day period.
“Monetization Partners
Portfolio X’s traffic was routed amongst 31 total DomainPower monetization partners, whose methods ranged from PPC to CPA to zero-click.”
Can we have some examples of landing pages that show “various type of Monetization Partners” implemented?
Hard to swallow without names, good be former blogs or sites, which were not categorized right, a short tweak can see a large influx from a few sites averaged over an entire portfolio.
Show us some names…
Am I missing something, or is that portfolio not even making regfee, even after the lift?
Without knowing the domains, it is impossible to know if it works…MDE could default to TM terms?
Instead of BSing the numbers, why don’t you use my domains and see how much $$$ comes in, then we talk!!
stop the ‘BullS”
I am just dying to see lander examples/layouts showing how various types of monetization partners are implemented on the same lander.
Plus I want to see how nice/professional the pages look.
I’m dubious.
“I am just dying to see lander examples/layouts showing how various types of monetization partners are implemented on the same lander.”
@ RK – The MDE is a not a lander, instead we route your domains to the landers of our 31 advertisers and monetization partners.
As is the case with any portfolio, not all domains are created equally, so revenue results will always vary on a name-by-name basis. However, we are confident in the results. And as such, for a limited time, we will GUARANTEE historical revenues for portfolios generating $3K per month or more, plus revenue share in the upside (subject to portfolio analysis). For those generating less than $3K per month, we invite you to test drive the platform and see the results.
The MDE is all about optimization, finding the most revenue opportunities independent of a single upstream provider.
– John Hett, PR and Marketing – Domain Holdings
Instead of offering guarantees why not just provide concrete evidence of the supposed superiority of your product? Sounds like another in a long line of broken domain dreams and promises.
@John
The forum has a point, maybe you should provide examples of the top 5 domains that made up that income to prove your point. Your guarantee is not exactly backed by the Federal Reserve…
@ John,
Ok, I get MDE traffic routing part.
Can you, however, provide examples of each kind of your lander or place a link here where we can check the lander styles/looks etc.
@Ron – We have to respect our clients wish to remain anonymous. A simple WhoIs lookup on a name we would provide here jeopardizes our relationship.
We believe that guaranteeing revenue is the most powerful testament to our confidence that we can provide. We are willing to put our money where our mouth is, which trumps facts and figures any day.
Am I missing something, or is that portfolio not even making regfee, even after the lift?
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There’s a type of portfolio that runs black (and can even be very profitable) in spite of not making its nut on parking. It makes it back on resales.
Think 2000-2004 type names.
A very modest 1% sell-through rate @ a tragically modest $1K average per domain and all that parking is pure profit.
I have half the domains this person does and make many fold what this portfolio does.
It sure seems like a weak earning portfolio.
If you can get that kind of % lift off a weak portfolio, and it has to either be filled with junk domains or brandables to be that weak, then a strong portfolio you’d think would have an even higher lift.
Anyone recognize that lander? I don’t.
It’d be nice to know what parking company the lift was over.
Bodis lander?
John, tough crowd.
@Harry…..those of use that have been around this industry get tired of moving domains to new services that promise wonders. It throws off stats and current optimization at your standby parking company. You also share all your stats with this new company.
IMO, there is a litany of companies that made pie-in-the-sky claims but have basically come and gone, so being suspect of anything new is natural :
Epik
Bans
DevHub.com
DomainAdvertising.com
Above.com
WhyPark.com
DomainApps.com
WannaDevelop.com
AEIOU.com
Where are these companies now? The existing ones seem like mere shells of what they were.
The only two break-out, memorable moments in domaining since it’s inception has been the arrival of Parked.com and then the arrival of InternetTraffic.com , so for a 91% gain to show up is another break-out moment. It just seems hard to swallow. I guess I have to try it to be really comment. The rest is speculation.
I have to admit this does seem intriguing considering who is behind it and that Mr. Berkens is using them also, per his comment in the last blog post. 🙂
One reason it’s a tough crowd is that Most parking solutions Still focus on pure type ins. There are plenty of domains out there that could (eventually) be a good purchase for end users, even though they get little or no type ins.
So, the holy grail for these types of domains would be a Scalable parking solution that gets them indexed and ranked enough so they can earn their keep from organic serps (without requiring non-scalable, full blown development). However, it appears that Big G is never, ever going to allow that.
Being a Domainer or developer are different animals. It can be argued that you should give up one and become the other. Telling someone to stop being who you are and be someone else helps make for a tough crowd.
So, there is a whole lot of pissing in the wind going on. All this pissing in the wind has left many domainers with nothing but a wet face and a bad taste in their mouth. Tough crowd, indeed.
But, there’s always hope for something revolutionary. Ya never know. If anyone can make it happen, they will “own” the industry.
This kind of information helps a lot. Thank you to Domain Holdings for sharing and MB for publishing.
If my math is right it costs about 88k a year (at $9) to renew the portfolio of 9,873 domains but even with a very impressive 91% increase in revenue (based on 30-days data) the portfolio earned just 42k-year. That means in-efffect the portfolio was in the red roughly 46k a year with income less than 1/2 of renewal costs. Why is that good? Is it a dubious quality low-typein low traffic portfolio? Maybe I am missing something.
David
There are some like Mike Mann that have hundreds of thousands of domains and don’t monetize them at all.
There is the sale component of domaining, so if you cover your renewal costs with monetization then all the money you make off the sales is pure profit.
Anyway the business model of owning these domains, isn’t domainholdings.com problem, its the domain holders.
Domainholdings like any one else in the space can only maximize revenue for the domain holder.
Michael, IMO, good portfolio income is also needed. It’s real tough to rely on sales (unless you are Michael Mann, have deep pockets, or other good sources of income) and be forced to subsidize your portfolio 10s of 1000s of dollars a year waiting for possible sales. For example, with my portfolio I had by far the best success ever as far as number of nice inquiries go with about 1% of my names getting serious inquiries in less than a year (many from what appears to be end-users). However, my percentage of actual sales was an extremely low 1% of that 1%, which I think works out to a real disappointing 1/100th of a percent (if my math is accurate). Maybe I am doing something wrong?
Hi all,
Paolo shared details of his study in the interview at http://www.domainsherpa.com/paolo-divincenzo-domainpower-interview/.
In addition, he shared proof of monetization and the domains with me, and I can personally vouch for the revenue increase.
Best,
Mike
Maybe I am doing something wrong?
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You might be.
I don’t own that many domains (less than a thousand). While a few were in that $500-$2500 purchase range, the enormous majority of them were drops or pre-releases purchased at the minimum cost.
Excluding names I pitch, just on cold inquiries, my sell-through rate is about 2%, the whole thing is quite profitable and I don’t entertain offers below $2K on anything.
I’m not entirely certain if domaining is a talent or a learned skill, but it’s probably a combo of both. Schwartz made a post in June of 2009 that is as close as you’re ever going to get to a roadmap, but so many domainers are totally hung up on the GAKT that a lot of the ‘remaining gold’ goes ignored while everyone fights over fools gold.
What this company doesn’t mention is that they only take on portfolios which earn in excess of 5k per month – that should exclude 95% of other domainers. So it can’t be a big deal then if they only concentrate on high earning domains. (I’ve made the same point on Domainsherpa as well btw)
Re: “You might be. I don’t own that many domains (less than a thousand). While a few were in that $500-$2500 purchase range, the enormous majority of them were drops or pre-releases purchased at the minimum cost. Excluding names I pitch, just on cold inquiries, my sell-through rate is about 2%, the whole thing is quite profitable and I don’t entertain offers below $2K on anything.”
My bad in my post regarding 1% getting inquires. Was so concerned about my math never looked for typos. The 1% should have been 10% or 10 times more than stated. However, the sold names was not a typo in that is is just 1/10th of 1% so if you are at a sell through rate of 2% that’s a very substantial 20 times my rate of sales! However, without benefit of research I feel like my 10% inquiry rate is likely well above average but is little consolation to me what with the incredibly poor percentage of actual sales. P.S. What could I be doing wrong with such rare sales but lots of good inquries?
The names making the money are typos in this industry, some of the best generic portfolio’s earn pennies compared to one good typo with solid daily traffic. It’s all about risk, how long you can float the cash on big ticket names before selling them to recoup cost and (hopefully) a good profit margin. Personally I would rather make a few hundred bucks a day parking rev than have to hold onto names making nothing for the next 10 years *hoping* someone is gonna come along and buy them because their letters or name matches what I have. Most of the big generics that were gonna get bought for big bucks have already been spoken for, many companies are opting to spend less on domains and spend more on branding & advertising regardless of what website they are using this is just the state of the market. If you have CompanyXYZfavoriteproductexactname.com for 100k they will likely just register something along the lines of XYZfavoriteproductexactnamesomethingelse.com for $9 a year. Of course this does not apply to fortune 500 companies buying tier 1 generic 1 word domains but those sales are very far and few between these days and the price of admission to even play in that arena is at least a 6 figure investment.
I have been using this service for some time now and the interface is great (easy to use) and the MDE is showing some great results but as of yesterday over 250 of my domains in the REDIRECT mode have been sent to a URL which is like this http://ww6.foundation.com.au/?ai=2 and this has seriously impacted my revenue from an affiliate aspect drastically. So I have emailed my account rep and hope that this is resolved ASAP 🙁
@ Rod – We have a revenue guarantee at $3K (lowered from $5K quoted in the DomainSherpa interview) and no minimum to sign up.
@David, we had a brief redirect issue and it has been resolved. I sent you an email earlier as well.
– John Hett, Domain Holdings
The Peeps,
Why don’t you try MDE and get back to us with some results in a month or 2.
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Anon,
You referring to http://www.ricksblog.com/my_weblog/2009/06/nouns-adjectives-and-verbs-are-what-domains-are-all-about.html?
so is mhb saying mr. mann does does monetize tm encroaching combo names like facebook____?
one way or another, with that many landing points, he’s steering traffic. but it’s not being done in a commercially beneficial way? hard to believe.
in any event, unless i’ve missed it, there is something that is missing from the theorisations in this thread.
the role of typos, be they aimed at tm’s or generics, has been mentioned. that is a major element.
but there’s another one.
it’s the p-word.
if you subtract all adult-oriented names from large porfolio domainer’s holdings, what revenue remains?
the “dirty” names subsidise the “clean” ones.
and when we talk about the glories of domaining we only talk about the clean names. makes for a good image of the “industry”.
Hey @John,
Thanks for the prompt reply and good to see the redirect issue resolved. 🙂
DP is one of the easiest interfaces I have used in a long time and the ability to easily create groups and manage your domain portfolio is great! I make more revenue from affiliate networks than domain parking let me just make that very clear.
Cheers,
David
@John
I find the following sentence a bit ambiguous:
“We have a revenue guarantee at $3K and no minimum to sign up”
That to me sounds like anyone can join with any number of domains with no earnings BUT will be guaranteed $3k in revenue! (I know that can’t be true)
@David
Any chance of looking at your affiliate sites somehow?
@Ron I grabbed this from a previous comment in the thread clarify the guarantee – For a limited time, we will GUARANTEE historical revenues for portfolios generating $3K per month or more, plus revenue share in the upside (subject to portfolio analysis). For those generating less than $3K per month, we invite you to test drive the platform and see the results.
Thanks @David. We are glad you like it!
My apologies, the last comment was intended for you @Rod. I wanted to clarify your question regarding the revenue guarantee.
@John
Okay thanks for clarification.
John,
For a user who is trying to optimize the value of their name it does them/us (me) no good to re-route domains to your advertising/monetization partners. I liked the “shopping comparison” format you used to offer because it was customizable to product suggested by the domain name. Also invested considerable time and effort in structuring headers customized to the domain name. All for naught.
——————————————-
@ RK – The MDE is a not a lander, instead we route your domains to the landers of our 31 advertisers and monetization partners.
As is the case with any portfolio, not all domains are created equally, so revenue results will always vary on a name-by-name basis. However, we are confident in the results. And as such, for a limited time, we will GUARANTEE historical revenues for portfolios generating $3K per month or more, plus revenue share in the upside (subject to portfolio analysis). For those generating less than $3K per month, we invite you to test drive the platform and see the results.
The MDE is all about optimization, finding the most revenue opportunities independent of a single upstream provider.
– John Hett, PR and Marketing – Domain Holdings
@John
“For those generating less than $3K per month, we invite you to test drive the platform and see the results.”
So, does that mean anyone can join with any quality and quantity of domains? What if the application is turned down?
So what happened to the revs after Feb 9th ?