I've heard transparency mentioned more and more with respect to parking, but can you define what it would mean to a domain owner? What exactly are you looking for and what can a parking company provide? Would the statistics given to each parking company by G&Y be exactly the same? How much information is a parking company forced to give back to G&Y to use the feed? (Namely, are parking companies completely transparent to G&Y?).

Hmm, I think I could fire a million questions in this area. Is there anywhere that the G&Y api documention are published? I realize a feed isn't useful without revenue share, but it would be cool to take a look at what parking companies look at.

This is what I think should happen for transparency. Given that parking companies need to maintain their competitive advantage I would propose the following:
Twice each year each parking company select a reputable external auditor (such as Pricewaterhouse, Ernst & Young, KPMG etc) and also a domainer. For obvious reasons the domainer needs to be under a strict NDA. The purpose of the domainer is to assist the auditor in auditing the PROCESSES and provide and updated understanding of the industry and processes associated with parking. When the audit is completed the domainer could stand up at conference and read a prepared document indicating that the audit was complete successfully and that the audited parking company is "squeaky clean".
This would have the benefit of the audit with the PWC stamp of approval etc plus the additional benefit of a real domainer putting their own reputation on the line. The parking company would benefit tremendously from this processes in cleaning up their system but also in the marketing potential that this would offer them.

Hmm, it's a very worthwhile idea. However, I feel a bit like it's trying to put too small a bandage on a much larger problem. I wonder further how much our job is being impeded by the parking companies and google themselves.

For instance, Sedo is right now offering this promotion for us to improve the income on our portfolios through optimization. How do I do that knowing so very little about my traffic. We can definitely optimize our end to understand user intent, but to throw it into a black box? My job can't be done properly because we're given imperfect information. I don't need "realtime" stats that are engineered, I want actual data.

I understand the need for competitive advantage, but ideally for me would be an opensource parking company. I'd like to know which advertisements in particular are earning income, how much they're earning, which clicks are getting paid versus which are not. When are clicks being paid, how often, when should I send my traffic elsewhere? Understood there are ways to exploit this but within the spirit of matching the right traffic with the right advertiser, we're so far removed right now with the parking systems it's infuriating.

If an advertiser is displaying poorly formatted advertisements then it dilutes the quality of my portal. Or more generally if there are advertisers on my site who cannot convert and make our traffic look bad, then I want to blacklist them. I don't know why more people aren't outright angry about things. When I see an advertisement displayed on my domain that's directing to another parking company arbitraging my traffic with the SAME BLOODY google feed, it makes me go berzerk. It's insulting especially within the context that I know this niche CPA values range from 15 to 150 EURO per conversion and I see 0.10 euro clicks? (All keywords, terms, etc. are optimized).

Moving into optimization and understanding this side of the industry I'm thoroughly frustrated. I don't see much value addition from parking companies, but then perhaps that's because of this lacking transparency. Beyond that the only value I see google adding is through their advertiser amalgamation series.

Great post!
I believe that the challenge for domainers is to pressure parking companies to be more transparent and once this is done to then raise the heat on Google and Yahoo. Individually we have little power (even the big guys) but corporately we control a $1.1b revenue stream.
I've never seen another parking company trying to arbitrage traffic on another parking company's parked pages....I'd love to get a screen shot though The problem that you face with the .1 euro clicks in your example is that your domains are a part of a pool of domains which all get smartpriced downwards depending upon the quality of the pool....not good.
I think that optimisation is both a science and an art.....which means sometimes we get it and sometimes we don't...but hopefully we get it more often then we don't.

wow, I'm baffled by this. Was just getting you a screenshot but I can now do one step better for you and show you a parking company displaying an advertisement to the same parking company. Beyond that, the vast majority of the other ads are to other arbitraged sites.

If that sounded confusing, I'll say it again. I have a domain parked with sedo, displaying an advertisement to another domain parked with sedo...

It does have something to do with geotargeting and as a result could be my own fault (I haven't done language based keyword targeting and the original language is not english). But still, it's so beyond obtuse that it's comical.

That's really interesting.
Is it possible that the advertiser has set the incorrect URL to advertise to? This has resulted in it looking like the parking company is doing some arbitrage,,,