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.

You can learn quite a bit of information from public companies who must disclose just about every thing that could have an implication on the value of the company. Because of this, it’s a smart idea to follow the filings of various domain companies so you can read up on company filings, rather than rely on blogs and other news outlets who may or may not report on certain events/filings.

Some publicly traded companies that are required to make public filings that are related to the domain industry include the following (please let me know if I missed any company):

Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Marchex
Top Level Domain Holdings
Tucows
Dark Blue Sea
Verisign
Banks.com

In order to follow these companies, I set up a stock portfolio in Yahoo specifically with domain industry related stocks. This allows me to see where they are trading as well as news reports and SEC (or other) filings. Don’t simply rely on others’ interpretations of news – and don’t get delayed news reports that fly under the radar (domain sales for example).

Follow these and other related companies and be more informed as a result.

I’ve been reading many articles about Microsoft’s $80-$100 million marketing campaign and about how Bing’s search market share continues to grow. If this trend continues even when the marketing campaign ends, this could be very good news for generic .com domain investors.

Based on a small sampling of searches I tested, it seems that Bing gives generic domain names higher rankings than Google or Yahoo. It’s the case with my websites, Burbank.com, Lowell.com, Newburyport.com, and Torah.com. It’s also the case with a number of other generic .com domain names that I checked in both search engines.

Bing’s market share is still very low, so the impact is minor. In fact, I highly, highly doubt Bing will overtake Google in the near future. However, if Bing does grow and eats into Google’s share, and/or if Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search business and the generic domain name rankings of Bing transfers to Yahoo, we could see more companies valuing generic domain names for their SERP value.

Here’s a comparison of the rankings of a small number of websites with generic domain names in Google and Bing:

Casino.com: – Google: 6 – Bing: 1 for Casino
Burbank.com: – Google: 5 – Bing: 2 for Burbank
Lowell.com: – Google: 10 – Bing: 2 for Lowell
Newburyport.com: – Google: 8 – Bing: 2 for Newburyport
Mortgage.com: – Google: 9 – Bing: 1 for Mortgage
Soccer.com: – Google: 1 – Bing: 1 for Soccer
DogSupplies.com: – Google: 3 – Bing: 1 for Dog Supplies
Airfare.com: – Google: 7 – Bing: 1 for Airfare
Fly.com: – Google: 7 – Bing: 2 for Fly
Chairs.com: – Google: NR – Bing: 3 for Chairs
Torah.com: – Google: 20 – Bing: 8 for Torah
HomeFashions.com: – Google: 7 – Bing: 2 for Home Fashions

One thing that is especially good is that most of the websites above wouldn’t be recognized by consumers as the brand leader. In the Lowell market for example, most people would probably consider the Sun newspaper to be the market leader. Likewise, in the pet marketplace, people would probably choose Pet Smart or Pet Co as the market leader.