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Simply put, a domain is a website address.  When someone decides to develop a website, generally one of the first things they do is register a domain name.  The domain name tends to be something unique that reflects whatever the website is promoting.  Once registered, the domain name belongs to that person for as long as they continue to pay for it.  Once registered, the URL will be pointed to a dummy page and parked until the website is developed.

Sometimes URLs are purchased with the sole intent of parking them to make money as an advertising site.  This type of domain development and monetization is called domain parking.

Domain Parking

Domain parking allows a URL owner and/or third-party to use a dummy page to create revenue through advertising.  There are two levels to domain parking: one where the URL owner does not receive a portion of the revenue and one where he/she does.  For the URL owner, the latter is often the more desirable option.  For many, this is the way in which the monetize their site.

Because domain parking does not generally provide a high-level of revenue per URL, people who use parked domains to generate income from advertising usually register hundreds of URLs for mass domain development.  Most of these URLs, if not all, will have a common theme and point to one place specific to that user’s domain development and monetization scheme.

The Decline of Domain Parking Revenue

Domain parking relies on two sources of traffic: 1) search engine results and 2) key-ins.  But in the past few years, Google has made changes that place both sources under threat.

Search Engine Results

For this, Google’s ranking criteria has become more stringent.  To ensure that a user lands on a legitimate seller’s site, they look for: 1) level of content, 2) how often the content is updated, and 3) whether the site has the ability to sell products – i.e., a shopping cart, BBB seal, accepted credit card list, etc.  Parked sites don’t have these things.

Key-Ins

Key-in traffic doesn’t rely on search engine rankings, so in 2008 Google announced that advertisers could opt-out of ad sites (seen as poor sources).  With advertisers being able to choose not to pay for clicks made from parked domains, revenue from these sites has greatly diminished.

Developing Your Domain to Increase Traffic

To increase revenue from domain parking, sites nowadays need to be more developed.  Search engines are looking for content, so it is content that ultimately needs to be provided.  For maximum traffic, the content must be relevant and rich in keywords.

The easiest way to ensure keyword-rich content is via news and reviews from outside websites.  RSS feeds are perfect for this.  For instance, using the keywords “PS3”, “Sony”, and “PlayStation 3”, the parked page would perhaps include a search module presenting current news and reviews relating to the PS3 next to a featured product module, which is showing images and links to associated PS3 and related-product seller sites.  People looking for PS3s would find the parked site and if/when they clicked, a commission would be earned.

Many companies are finding that the social networking of their current and potential clients can be more important than the sale they might make to that client. This new way of utilizing the power of prediction and network analysis is becoming the new way to market by utilizing social networks.

An article in the Economist outlines the idea. Using network analysis software, companies can make predictions about all kinds of things in regards to their customers, users, or clients. What the software is specifically looking for in most cases are “influencers” – those who often make decisions that move other people with them.

A telecomm in India, for isntance, uses the power of predictive analysis to see who has influence with a fair number of subscribers and then targets advertising and special deals directly at those influencers. By doing so, they’ve greatly reduced their desertion rate by keeping those who influence others to change networks happy.

Corporations use it to find the most influential people in their makeup so they can utilize those people to move forward an agenda or program.

What analysts have found is that those with social influence in a given setting, be it amongst friends and family for telecom or in the corporate infrastructure, have things that can be pinpointed and then exploited. For instance, most “influencers” are people who send and receive a lot of messages, but whose outgoing messages are often longer than their incoming and whose networks are large. An influential person in the office, for instance, will likely make numerous calls to delegate authority or find out information and those outgoing calls will be long. Incoming calls are usually questions being asked of the influencer and will be shorter. The same goes for most text or email messages as well.

Software to analyze these trends and a lot of other data is entering the main stream and the technology is booming. Gawker attributes this as the reason Facebook, Google, and others have been loosening their privacy constraints and opening up more network data. There’s a lot to be had (and money to be made) by tapping into these social networks.

The inclusion of social networks into the data mining already the norm at most businesses, especially retail and online sales, is an obvious next step. Even governments are in on the tech, using it to track everything from white collar thieves to terrorists.

According to the Economist, the next step in predictive analysis is to look at even larger segments of society to predict everything from Hezbollah rocket attacks to guiding counter intelligence operations.

Image via Business Insider

A lot has been buzzing around regarding the contract that New York resident Paul Ceglia produced claiming an 84% ownership stake in Facebook, allegedly signed when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a Freshman in college.  Two things need to be understood about this contract and what it could or couldn’t mean.

First of all, any contract is open to interpretation.  What seems clear and to the point to one person is generally vague enough that another (i.e. a lawyer) can make it say something different.  This is why contracts are often extremely complex and full of small print.  The contract in question here is only two pages long.

As it’s written, it’s a basic “work for hire” contract which many freelancers and businesses who hire contractors have probably seen or used before.  It boils down to Zuckerberg agreeing to give up 50% of a brainchild software called “The Face Book” in return for $1,000 in seed money from Ceglia.  This is an interesting sum of money, since Ceglia paid Zuckerberg the same amount to write a one-off piece of software for his own website at about this same time.

If the contract is valid as-is, then Ceglia is entitled to at least half of Facebook’s current value (in stock).  That, of course, assumes that the contract is valid, that there hasn’t been a statute of limitations passed in the State of New York, and that the wording is such that a judge would agree to arguments that it means half or more of the social networking site.  There’s the rub, since it’s possible that the valuation could be moved backwards in time to either when Facebook first went public or when it received it’s first influx of venture capital.

The real problem here is timing.  As Gawker points out, the timing of the whole thing seriously undermines Ceglia’s claim that “The Face Book” was conceived between himself and Zuckerberg.  Every webrepreneur knows that the first step in starting an online project is to find the right domain name.  If these two planned to make “The Face Book,” it would seem obvious that they would immediately register “Facebook.com” or “TheFaceBook.com” or some variant.  That didn’t have until almost a year later.

Finally, it’s pretty obvious that someone who had a contract with Zuckerberg for something else would have access to his signature and other details and could easily create a forged document to claim ownership of another property.  Especially given that at the time that this contract was supposedly signed, Zuckerberg was working on “FaceMash,” the fledgling idea for Facebook and the name that would be much more likely to be believable were it on Ceglia’s contract.

In the end, the courts or a team of lawyers and experts will decide whether Ceglia has a claim.  From all indications so far, he doesn’t.  What is really exacerbating the whole issue is the fact that, thus far, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s responses to this have been vague.

All industries are now tapping into ecommerce, and the food services industry is no exception.  In an attempt to keep pace with modern technology, restaurants, fast food and coffee shop chains are adding web ordering, table reservation tools, Facebook pages and iPhone applications to complement their current services.

Web ordering and Smartphone applications have helped offer hard working people a quick and convenient method of ordering products and services. Dunkin Donuts’ iPhone application can be added to a group listing for reciprocal ordering.  Personalised favourite menu options help to make orders even speedier.

Domino’s Pizza also offers a successful pizza sales option with mobile-based order tracking. According to Domino’s Pizza, 30% of total sales originate as web orders and web sales are expected to supersede telephone orders in 3-5 years.  Companies such as Domino’s Pizza are also cashing in on the popularity of social networking sites and are introducing revenue share incentives for people who add Domino’s Pizza’s ads to their Facebook pages.

Pizza Hut, the U.K. and world’s leading pizza delivery chain has also followed suit, estimating an average 25% increase in sales since it launched its online ordering feature in 2007.  Pizza Hut discount codes and Pizza Hut discount vouchers, also available online, make web ordering even easier and purchase more economical. Diners can now also use online table reservation tool functions and also collect web orders from dine-in restaurants.

Online web ordering options makes it simple for people to organise last minute outings and are an easy way for businesses to increase sales by taking advantage of today’s hectic lifestyle, where people are often in need of food on the go.

Early on Tuesday, Twitter unveiled its long-expected paid advertising program, calling it “Promoted Tweets”. Messages from advertisers will be put into users’ twitter streams with initial advertisers including Bravo, Starbucks and Virgin America – all of which have already been using Twitter to promote their brands. Twitter has been edging closer to being a mainstream internet business and the obvious question has been how it plans on making money. Although Twitter’s founders have hinted at a few ideas, nothing concrete has yet been forthcoming. However it is to no one’s surprise that paid-for Tweets at the top of search results – a rather familiar idea – is picked as Twitter’s main business model.

The company claims this effort to be a new “non-traditional” approach to advertising but search ads are nothing new. According to a FAQ on the Twitter blog “We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you…” and “… [we will] stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate”. This reflects Facebook’s advertising platform where users can vote ads up or down on the site, an attempt to give users some sort of control over what they see, given that whichever brand appears is purely down to monetizing screen real estate.

Twitter says it will give further information on the plans for an ad service at the company’s first developer conference that opens tomorrow in San Francisco. Over $160 million in venture capital has been spent on the company and investors are no doubt eager to see profits as the user-focused website try to find a way to make money while keeping users content.

It seems that the recent release of several competitors in the electronic book reader arena has made Amazon a little nervous.  Amazon announced, via press release, the availability of the Kindle Development Kit (KDK), which allows software engineers to build interactive book kits for the popular reader.

Brad Stone at the New York Times has high hopes for the KDK.  So far, the kit has only been formally released to select developers, but it will enter open beta next month.  There will be three types of application: free, paid, and subscription apps.

In another article, Stone considers the ramifications of Amazon’s move versus Apple’s quiet courting of publishers with the pending release of its new tablet platform.  That tablet is expected to become a book reader of choice for many who would prefer a more all-in-one device (computer, notebook, and book reader).

Yet the two devices are extremely different and hard to compare in this way.  The Kindle, for instance, was built from the ground up as a book reader and nothing more.  It will, of course, be much cheaper than Apple’s tablet, but beyond that, it is nothing close to the standard notebook computer.

The Kindle, for instance, doesn’t have the ability to show fast-moving or even very animated graphics and, in fact, can’t even display color.  The Kindle’s E Ink screen refreshes slowly and the Kindle’s wireless connection is paid for through the purchases made by the consumer (book downloads, software updates, etc.) and will continue to be so.  There are no monthly fees with the device.  Even active content from the new developer kit would be paid for in this manner.

Interestingly, while Amazon has been planning the KDK for quite a while, their mention of it about a year ago coincided with the announcement from Barnes & Noble and others who planned to release their own reader to the market to compete with the Kindle.  That may be the driving force behind Amazon’s decision more than anything Apple is doing.