I just received an email update from Parked.com regarding the Yahoo and Bing merger, and the change over from the Yahoo feed to the Bing feed for Parked customers.  I would imagine this update also goes for WhyPark customers as well.

Here’s the email update:

As many of you may be aware, the migration from Yahoo to Bing.com/Microsoft is already underway and will be completed within the next few days.  All traffic that is currently sent to Yahoo in the US and Canada will be migrated from Yahoo to Bing.  Since these changes are being implemented in phases, we wanted to keep you informed of the process by providing specific dates of each phase to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Currently in the initial phase, 20% of all traffic we receive is sent to Bing. On Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10am PST, Yahoo is scheduled to migrate up to 50% of the traffic to Bing.  Then in the final phase on Monday, October 25, 2010 at 10am PST, Yahoo will be migrating all of the remaining traffic to Bing.  So far the migration has been going very well and we’re seeing some nice increases in overall revenue across the board.

Parked.com has always utilized the PST time zone in regards to our reporting, because our primary ad provider, Yahoo, has always used PST.  Bing however, uses UTC as their time zone. As a result, we have decided to change the time zone of our reports to match those of Bing to ease the transition now and going forward.  This means that today we will be changing everything to use UTC which will result in 7 fewer hours in the reporting day.

While the overall migration is going very well, there have been some delays in receiving stats from Bing.  The stats for October 8th and October 15th were received after the payments were finalized for the 22nd payout date.  Instead of causing any disruption to the normal payout schedule, we have updated your account and added a credit on the next payment which will be on November 7th.  If you generated any revenue with Bing on these particular days, you will be receiving an email from us indicating how much additional revenue was added to your account.

There are additional changes that are currently occurring as a result of the migration including how keywords are used, changes in countries/markets, and traffic quality scores.  For more information on these and any other changes, please check our forum which is updated with the latest information as it becomes available. The forum is located at http://forum.parked.com/forumdisplay.php?23-Yahoo-to-Bing-Migration

If you have any concerns please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager with any questions or simply post them on the forum.

I received an email from Craig Rowe, President of WhyPark, announcing a charity auction the company will be running in December. Full details about the auction can be found on the WhyPark Auction page.

At this point, they’re looking for high-quality domain submissions to be auctioned.  All domains will be donated for the auction with the proceeds going to the charity chosen by the highest single bidder. So, if you support a certain charity, it’s a good incentive to bid a little higher on a domain to be able to choose the recipient of the full auction proceeds.  WhyPark will  verify that it’s a socially-responsible charity.

This is a 5-day domain auction set to begin on December 7th and end December 11th. Approximately 50 domains will be chosen for the charity auction, and all domains will start with no reserve. At the close of the auction, the single highest bid from all auctions will be able to choose the charityto receive all net proceeds.

WhyPark continues to make improvements to their platform – some are obvious to the domain/website owner and some are more subtle. My personal favorite are the changes to the URL, which I commented on a few weeks ago. Instead of seeing http://www.oenophiles.com/dg33644-hd3-ddj.cfm (or something of the like), the URLs are now much more search engine friendly: http://oenophiles.com/p41899-types-of-wine-shiraz-wines.cfm

Below is recent news released by WhyPark:

New URL Format and More Premium Templates

Two New Features: Quick View and Group Edit/Remove

Need Help? Get Instant Support with Live Chat

When I wrote my original post about WhyPark’s services (actually an interview with WhyPark CEO Craig Rowe), a number of comments and questions ensued. I think it’s great to have the opportunity to openly communicate with people like Craig and Stephen (VP of Development). I just saw that WhyPark has a discussion forum, so if you have further questions, you can jump on a thread over there to discuss.

I also want to provide an update on my site that I have at WhyPark, which is Oenophiles.com. Both traffic and revenue have increased and there are 63 pages indexed in Google, which is strong considering that there were about 25 unique articles created for the site.

The things I like about WhyPark, specifically related to Oenophiles.com:
- Integration of social media for viral marketing
- Related searches (related to the article) lead to PPC links
- Easy to set up and manage

Things I would like changed:
- Better URLs (more user and SE friendly)
- Better meta descriptions and more comprehensive titles

For me, WhyPark makes sense because it’s easy to use, generates passive revenue, and was much easier to build than doing it myself.

WhyPark announced some changes to their monetization model today, and these changes should lead to higher payouts for domain owners who have sites with WhyPark. It’s also a good way to test your ad system vs. their feed in a vacuum environment (testing is the best way to see what works and what doesn’t).

Personally, I used WhyPark for my wine-lovers website, Oenophiles.com. I was very pleased with the support from WhyPark, and the name is doing better with them than it was doing parked (by a lot).

I will be publishing an interview with WhyPark CEO Craig Rowe next week, and I am sure industry veteran Stephen Douglas will have some good input as well.