Hi Americar,
Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I was dealing with various email spammers etc. Was also my birthday yesterday
The comments you make are very interesting and valid and I would like to answer them in some detail.
At ND, we have always tried to be at the forefront of parking technology and have introduced a raft of new technologies to the market which are taken for granted nowadays. We were the first, among other things, to:
- offer tracking and optimization per advertising region
- show a preview of your parked pages in multiple regions with the ND sandbox
- have full IDN implemtnation (we are still one of the only companies to come close to this)
- offer attractive landers
- offer headers selectable by the users
- offer the option of removing user searches
- offer sales offers directly to your own sales page
- add custom banners to your pages
- offer a folder system
- provide a blog for updates to our services / pages etc
- offer the option to capitalise letters in your domain name
There are several other things which we have done which are now taken for granted but were ignored for a long time by the Powers That Be. Even the way we go about our daily business is different to everything that went before and we are perfectly aware that many other companies watch what we do and replicate that. For instance, one company's Autumn promotion does look very similar to our own Spring Bonus, don't you think...? We have also heard that Park & Sell's success has led a large sales platform to start a roll out of their own revenue-based sales offers.
As far as transparency is concerned, we are
still after two years the only major parking company who shows you your cut of precisely what Google pays us for your traffic - hence the 24 hour revenue update. All other companies simply guesstimate, which is a good explanation for why some domains do so much better with us than elsewhere and vice versa.
Regarding percentage payouts, as we pay a direct cut of Google's payment to us, we are contractually forbidden to reveal our revenue share as they do not want the end user to know precisely what they are paying their partners. In addition to this, as stated very often on this board, we do not wish to enter into other company's claims on "revenue share". We have carried out many tests with other providers - as have our users - and their percentage claims just don't seem to cut the mustard. An account at one provider with "80%" rev share was performing more poorly than an account with "60%" rev share. This is smoke and mirrors thrown up by some companies and we do not wish to become involved. A new company offering "100%" rev share (explain how they stay in business...) still performs less well on our 3 test portfolios than other providers.
We are as transparent as we possibly can be in the terms of our contract, we simply want the earnings to do the talking and not the rev share.
I will not pretend that, while we innovate in the market and continue to bring new ideas to the table, some companies have taken our ideas to another level in some respects. We never sit still and are constantly looking for new ways to improve your overall experience and earnings. We are doing just that at the moment with some really exciting improvements and these will be available to all in the not too distant future.
I can assure you that it is not just a case of "beef up the rev share", there are a huge number of factors involved in providing a solid service and, while we are content with what we have done in the 26 months we have been providing our service to you, there is still a huge amount to come to us in the future, as our ever-increasing customer base and DNS parked domains goes to show.
Sorry, that went on for a bit long, perhaps. I apologise for that! I hope it does address your concerns though.
Ed