It appears that .mobi has settled in the case of music.mobi. After a long brewing debate and absurd proposals from .mobi, they have finally given the antics a rest and handed the domain over to the auctions original domain winner. For more information about the .mobi story check out this link http://www.namepros.com/dot-mobi/403779-i-bid-611-000-music-mobi.html. Check this out and think twice before entering into an auction with sedo or even buying a .mobi. I think ICANN needs to regulate things a bit more closely. Does anyone think the .ASIA will be an even bigger scam….. I sure do. In the .mobi situation you had the ability to purchase names, but all premium names were to be auctioned off. So if you want jimmyshungryhouseofhamburgers.mobi no problem…simply log into your registrar and buy it. Now lets say you want hamburgers.mobi…well now that is different. Shouldn’t it be first come first serve? There never was an open market for these “Premium domains” they are all auctioned off to the highest bidder to put more money in the pocket of a greedy company. Now lets take a look at the .ASIA extension. Can you guess what they want to do? You got it…AUCTION OFF EVERY DOMAIN!!!!!! So if you and another guy look into the same domain name that is two interested parties, now you must bid against each other for the .ASIA domain. There is no fairness or openness to this method.

According to an email from Yahoo Search Marketing, minimum bids are no longer fixed at $0.10. This could be due to a improved ad network since Yahoo has taken great measures to begin fighting arbitrage traffic. I think this is a great step for Yahoo to take. Google already allows the advertiser to bid less than .10, and has also tightened its quality scoring and guidelines to fight the arbitrage. In the end i think we may see a better conversion for advertisers, and better payouts for publishers. The email below is directly from Yahoo. I thought i would include it for you to see.

The email from Yahoo reads:

It seems that Yahoo is pulling the plug on its domainer’s or parking companies that are performing what is known as arbitrage. Arbitrage is the process of buying a domain based on the keyword you wish to advertise for and parking it or hosting publisher ads, while at the same time driving cheap traffic to those domains via a PPC provider. The concept is simple. Come up with a competitive term that pays high to the publisher, while driving relevant traffic to that site for a fraction of the cost. The domain parking companies that utilize the Yahoo ad feed have sent warnings in various forms about arbitrage and how it is strictly prohibited. What do you think this will do to the domain industry? Will we see parking companies begin to struggle for survival, or will they shift gears and adapt to the situation. It will certainly change the way some people have been making their living over the past several years.

Earlier this month VoIP launched RazrClick a Pay Per Call advertising
service. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with pay per
call, it is a form of advertising similar to PPC with the exception
that with Pay Per Call the advertiser will actually get a phone call.

This
is basically how it works. The merchant defines his relevant keywords
or terms and chooses the desired vertical or category. The advertiser
can set up Geo Targeting with most providers to really get granular
with the market and delivery of their ad. After the campaign is set up
you can create the ad containing your pitch or company name, address, a
description of your service or goods, and a toll free tracking number
that will reroute to your phone and allow you to track your potential
sales calls.

One clear advantage of Pay Per Call over Pay Per
Click is the click fraud that is rampant in Pay Per Click is currently
not an issue with Pay Per Call. Even though Pay Per Call is just
getting started, it is projected that by 2009 the Pay Per Call revenue
in U.S alone will top 4 billion dollars. Advertisers pay
on average $8 to $10 per Pay-Per-Call considerably higher than they
might pay for a typical Pay-Per-Click
ad. VoIP, not only  intends to capture a share of this Pay Per Call
market with the release of RazrClick, they intend to capture the whole
thing. They claim that they have the only existing patent for the
technology and plan to aggressively pursue any infringer’s.

“There are many companies that are providing Pay-Per-Click
advertising. However, after careful research and consulting with
attorneys we believe we have the only patent in this space,” stated
Anthony Cataldo, CEO VoIP, Inc. “We intend to aggressively pursue all
infringers so that our shareholders can reap the benefit of the value
this patent affords the company; additionally we believe that all
providers of this type of advertising/technology are directly
violating our patents.”
Anthony Cataldo was also quoted as saying
“We have identified over 100 companies that have willfully infringed on our
patents. We intend to stop the infringement and defend our technology and the
patents behind it. These patents and the business they represent will be
utilized to provide the shareholders with the value they deserve and have long
awaited,” stated CEO Anthony Cataldo. “Citing case studies, in reference to
Click to Call, from Fortune 500 companies such as Continental Airlines, the ROI
was 50x cost of service. The service showed a 35% lead conversion rate twice
that of traditional leads and reduced website abandonment by over 25%.”
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In the end regardless
of the patent, I believe that Pay Per Call will offer a great
additional solution to a well rounded marketing campaign.

Hello, and welcome to PPC Playground. I decided to start this blog to talk about the PPC Industry, tactics, tips and whatever else I can think of that is relevant to the subject. I will be covering topics such as bid management, long tail strategies, contextual targeting, and much more. Stay tuned and keep checking back or grab the RSS feed to stay up to date on the newest posts.