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I've been writing a series articles on the importance of setting a measurement standard for parking companies. This standard would be for CPC, EPC, CTR, RPM, uniques etc and is a precursor to establishing true transparency for domain owners and ultimately domain investors.
 As a by-product of setting up standards I've been wrestling with with the problem of what needs to be reported and what is currently happening. For example, parking companies often define a user as a unique IP address over a period of time (usually between 18-24 hours). I'm not a technical expert but it seems to me that anyone using NAT (network address translation) would fall foul of this filter.
For example, my kid's school uses a single gateway IP address. If two teachers at the school surf the same parked page then it would be counted as one user. If you consider the number of schools, corporations and governmental bodies that all route large numbers of people via single IP addresses then there is a lot of traffic that is going unreported.
Notice that I didn't say that the revenue for clicks wasn't paid for (that's for a future article) but that the number of uniques are not being reported correctly.
So why do parking companies do this? I've come to the horrible conclusion that it's because we make them. Consider this problem. You're a parking company and your stats are delayed by G/Y by 48 hours. The problem is that your customers are demanding instant traffic stats. If the traffic is reported as is then domainers will see a large volume of traffic but G/Y don't acknowledge about 33% of it. If you display the high level of traffic with identical revenue then your RPMs will fall.
Many domainers still haven't realized that comparing RPM's across parking companies is a pointless exercise. By sending all of the traffic to G/Y and applying a filter on the reporting side you get a rough estimation of what G/Y will send back 48 hours later plus the added marketing benefit of higher RPM values. This is one of the contributing reasons why Sedo (24 hours) typically has lower RPM values compared to Domain Sponsor (18 hours).
My guess is that over time a parking company's traffic algorithms endeavour to learn and get smarter about how each domain's traffic is treated by G/Y. When they get is wrong you quite often see a mad scramble on the last day of the month to adjust all the figures.
Now, why is all of this our fault? If we didn't demand up to the minute stats then on what Google/Yahoo are going to report in 48 hours time then this problem would be resolved. I'd be very happy with delayed stats for the red items but up to the minute for the green items in the reporting standards outline above. This way we would all get more insight into our domains and be able to view real traffic for potential acquisitions.
Domain Wiki: CPC, EPC, CTR, RPM, Uniques, IP Address, Google, Yahoo
Related articles on Whizzbangsblog.com:
Parking Company Standards - Part 1
Standards - Part 2 - The journey to transparency
Standarxs - Part 3 - Traffic definitions and reporting
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