Comments on: The "Type In" PPC Play

By: Daleela

Daleela — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 19:04:55 +0000

Sure, such type of sites is legal to exist, but I don’t think, that a lot of users are interested in them.

By: Govested

Govested — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 05:23:19 +0000

Marchex buys domain names that have English phrases like siliconeimplants.com, Informationjobs.com, and bigemployment.com, that are filled with Yahoo sponsored links (they are a distribution partner). Marchex is buying lower priced keywords on Google, driving traffic to their site, and then arbitraging the difference between what they paid and what Yahoo! advertisers pay. I talked to a guy who owns a bunch of domain names who has a similar agreement with Google, and he said his Google contract specifically forbids him to bid on keywords to drive traffic to his site because I guess Google views it as just keyword arbitrage and not valuable for their advertisers. Marchex had some really egregious examples with completely irrelevant links, such as buying "Arabic" and putting their siliconeimplant.com site as the link, but that violated Google's advertiser rules so I think Google foced them to take it down. It seems the practice would not be good for Yahoo advertisers because essentially your advertisers are paying for higher priced keywords and Marchex is buying cheaper keywords to drive traffic to them. In the Arabic example, if Arabic costs 10c, each silicon implant advertiser is probably much more than that, so Marchex is making a spread.

Check out the slides of this nefarious practice here... http://berk.typepad.com/bshaw/2005/11/irrelevant_traf.html

By: Joe A

Joe A — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:14:53 +0000

Hi John,

I read your article about "Type In PPC Play".

I own the rights to about 400 domains so I suppose I am a small PPC Player. These domains pay for themselves and they produce a modest income for me. It is not "free money". I spent countless (hundreds of) hours over the years researching and gathering the types of domains that I thought would produce "type in traffic". Many of these domains were other people's garbage. Many of them were bought at a premium from domain drop listing services.

Your suggestion that those who play in the PPC market are linked to click fraud shows very poor logic and is nothing short of a direct and unfounded insult to a group of visionaries and successful entrepreneurs.

Domain names are virtual real estate, many of which attract qualified and interested customers on a regular basis and for a very low cost. To expect any entrepreneur to sit idly by and allow these valuable assets to go to the next registrant in the interest of fairness is foolishness; void of common business sense.

We have our bad players but there are a whole lot of legitimate and smart business practices that involve the buying, holding, and development of high quality type-in domain names and there are a lot of people involved in it that have the same right to display ads on their domain holding as this web property does to place an ad below your article.

I'd be happy to discuss or debate this with you more fully if you are interested. I felt compelled to at least write to you briefly since I think you have cast suspicion on a group of people who don't deserve it and on a practice which does not get the objective credit that it deserves for it's foresight and practical business benefits.

In my opinion, the model will last, people will continue to type in URLS in their address bars, and "patrician" is too nice of a way to describe your view, considering the insult and suspicion you have cast upon this growing and misunderstood group of visionaries.

Sincerely,

Joe A.

By: Antony Van Couvering

Antony Van Couvering — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:18:33 +0000

Estimates I’ve seen put “type-in” traffic at 15-20%. This is what someone at Yahoo said, and it’s the average of the informal poll I took at the recent ICANN meeting in Vancouver. See my longish post on the subject at http://www.namesatwork.com/blog/2005/11/19/15-of-all-web-traffic/.

Shabby? Perhaps. It’s just another use of a keyword. Is Google shabby because they monetize the exact same keywords being typed in to a search box instead of URL locator box?

By: Chuck

Chuck — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:22:48 +0000

Think of this. Domain names could be used like mortgage backed bonds. Buy up a bunch of similar names say for vacations (i.e. seattlevacations.com, vacationsseattle.com and so on – there are 1000s of combos). You can than take these urls and lease them out as prepackaged traffic, or sell the package. If the site is visually appealing and doesnt look like just a bunch of adds, it may be another alternative to local search. As the site gains traction people may bookmark it and you would not need to rely on mispellings to attract traffic, people may consider it a desirable destination.

By: domain

domain — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 04:50:14 +0000

–
and when I asked Google and Yahoo about them, they said they were legit because they were “type in” traffic sites, and the ads actually served a useful, directory like purpose.
–

did you expect something else?
Search machines finance themselves with adwords and adsense.

The visitor is nevertheless served with topic-relevant references better, as if he seek for camrecorder and get a sexsite

By: Webwork

Webwork — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 04:20:27 +0000

"People will catch on that their being fed auto-generated pages and just use a search engine to find quality content."

LOL. Anyone ever hear about "search engine autogenerated content spamming"?

The domain parking, PPC landing page industry has wised up and moved from delivering landing pages populated with "take all comers" generic links and moved towards a model that delivers landers populated with "on domain topic keyword links" that, when clicked, trigger the delivery of paid search feeds listing relevant websites. As a result the practice of direct navigation is likely to increase, not decrease.

By: John

John — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 23:21:43 +0000

According to CNET circa April, 2003:
Applied draws about a half billion unique impressions a month across its domain-name network, with a click-through rate of 50 percent on many of the listings.

According to me:
Could this now be 30-40% of Google's revenue? How much of this "network" is just trademark misspellings?

By: Search Engines Web

Search Engines Web — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 22:57:19 +0000

It is acceptable to purchase a misspelt/ misspelled domain name and include RELEVANT/ VALID Ads - to the Domain Name that is being typed....

eg searchenginess.com
Search Engine related Ads are appropriate.

Think of how much bandwidth is lost by people checking to see if the domain is available.

Where ethics come in to play - is typing a BRAND NAME or TRADEMARK misspelling and coming in contact with Ads.

But these intrusions can be addressed to ICANN for (dot)COM domains, and if they rule in the trademark's favor, they will gain access to those misspelt domains.. And for all new root domains there is a SUNSET period for trademark holders to request them eg. (dot)EU

By: Max Khesin

Max Khesin — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 20:40:52 +0000

I hate domainers, I totally agree that they are mostly lowlifes. Just read the Biz2.0 article - the main character is a total slimeball.
I wrote about some of this earlier

http://pythonzweb.blogspot.com/2005/12/plan-for-domain-name-spam.html

Kinda hoping for a Firefox plugin that would warn about a clickfacm during URL type-in.