A colleague in the office has hooked me on a particular phrase, “…and a Pony!” Jeff Atwood coined the phrase and first published on his Coding Horrors blog at the beginning of this year. Those who avidly follow the blogosphere will recognize the name Robert Scoble, formerly of Microsoft. Jeff took issue with something that Mr. Scoble thought web developers should do. You do not have to be familiar with the originating issue to understand the rebuttal. It goes something like this, “You know, it would be nice if every single website was designed to scale perfectly across all resolutions from 176x220 to 1920x1440. It'd also be nice if trees were made of cotton candy, and rain was delicious lemonade. This is what I refer to as ".. and a Pony!" thinking: the person asking the question doesn't know that what they're asking for is essentially impossible. So you might as well throw a Pony in there while you're at it. Everyone loves Ponies.”
Now, whenever I hear a request that just doesn’t make sense, I can’t help but say to myself, “…and a Pony.” In Jeff’s case, he found and-a-pony expectations with Robert Scoble’s request for web pages to be scalable across all browser settings. And, if you think about it, chances are you will find examples of either unrealistic expectations or ones that do not seem to make sense all together. One of them, even, recently landed in my inbox, courtesy of GoDaddy.
Most people in our industry have a familiarity with GoDaddy, either having purchased domains through them and/or having seen their commercials during the Super Bowl. Rising from obscurity, GoDaddy managed to become the largest registrar of names, like Wal-Mart having surpassed the long established incumbents to become the biggest retailer. The company offers its domains for a relatively inexpensive price which means its margins aren’t huge, and like a big box retailer, it has to sell a lot in order to make any real money.
Registering through GoDaddy is like walking on the Vegas strip. Before you can get to your destination, you must pass through so many offers that you end being up both distracted and almost discouraged the first few times. Eventually you become numb to the offerings and start looking to make sure you didn’t pick up anything you didn’t mean to. Case in point – the domain itself costs $9.25 to register, but if you left everything at its default settings but decided to select one of everything they offered in the upsell, e.g. some form of added registration (private registration, deluxe business registration or platinum registration), hosting, traffic stats, “turbo SSL”, ad free quick blog, email options, web site building, plus search engine and email spam options, you could wind up with a bill of more than $700 on checkout.
Very little at GoDaddy is free, and what is free is heavily promoted initially but out of view other times. The list of free options is decent, and it includes: “NEW! Quick Blog, NEW! Hosting with Web site builder, FREE! Complete Email, FREE! Getting Started Guide, FREE! Secure Domain Locking, FREE! Total DNS Control, FREE! Status Alerts, And much more!” All of which by the way is a $96 dollar value. So, when I received an email from GoDaddy announcing their latest service, it gave me pause. The headline states, “New Web trend - Cashing in on parked domains. Here's how...”
The email continues by saying, “Each Go Daddy domain name comes with a free parked Web page that "holds your place" on the Internet (while you decide how to use your domain name).” With this new service you can “Turn that placeholder into cash!” OK, so far so good, but here is where things get interesting. The bit reads, “You can earn money from that parked page for as little as $3.99/month - with NEW! CashParking, GoDaddy's new parked page pay-per-click system.” How? Well, “With CashParking, each time a visitor clicks on one of your parked page's advertisements, you receive up to 80% of the advertising revenue generated (depending on the plan you choose).
CashParking offers the most competitive revenue sharing in the industry.”
For one with experience in this “industry,” that is a funny claim. I’ve never heard of a monetization program (especially in the domain space) that asks you to pay for the right to make money. Google AdSense, CJ, AzoogleAds, etc., certainly do not. And then there is the price. It’s $3.99 for the lowest revenue share program. That means a domain would have to earn $80 in gross revenue for the CashParking participant to earn its money back ($80 x 60% revenue share). And, people will assume that their domain should make that much because why else would the price be that high. If the domain comes with that page free, but with 100% going to GoDaddy, then it’s not unreasonable to make that deduction on earnings.
Chances are though that GoDaddy came up with the pricing so that it would offset the opportunity cost of them not receiving 100% of the ad revenue. But, by trying to charge for something that the rest of the industry offers for free, it puts itself in a contrarian spot. Those that try it will either resort to click fraud to try and make their money back, or they will cancel the service with a bad taste in their mouth from GoDaddy. Another time, we might discuss the irony of the product coming from a company that is among the most critical of parking services, but for now, we must simply say, CashParking - $3.99+… and a Pony!
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