Comments on: Epik failed… It’s all in the numbers folks. PS — I told you so!

By: muhammed

muhammed — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:47:34 +0000

Looks like it has begun, Epiks claim to fame IceCreamMaker.com is now removed from Google.. I assume the rest of their sites will follow suit. I think this deserves a fresh new post based on all the hype surrounding that domain..

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 04:16:41 +0000

Anyone else having a hard time seeing the stats on epik sites? Looks like they might have taken them down.

“I find it very strange that Epic freely publishes the site metrics for the world to see. As an owner of one of these 6000 sites, I am bummed, especially since the stats are so poor. I would like the ability to opt for some privacy here.”

Sounds like you want to take down the stats out of embarrassment. Piss poor reason if you ask me.

By: Chuck Biscuits

Chuck Biscuits — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:45:16 +0000

I find it very strange that Epic freely publishes the site metrics for the world to see. As an owner of one of these 6000 sites, I am bummed, especially since the stats are so poor. I would like the ability to opt for some privacy here.

By: Scott Neuman

Scott Neuman — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:28:30 +0000

To continue, (damn cold), and hope the above makes sense from the cold tablets I’m taking, I’d think the value isn’t in the ecommerce landing pages to Epik but the actual amount of names they can sign up, the cross marketing that goes with it (business customers aren’t cheap to attract and we paid to be a customer to boot), and once they obtain a certain amount of customers, the system will run on free roll for them. (which is sort of does now).

By: Scott Neuman

Scott Neuman — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:24:57 +0000

Maybe it’s my business model of paying $250.00 that I don’t like because Epik will accept all comers with nothing really to loss but I’d have liked Epik to consider accepting only the domain names it thought it could make money on (like Fab does) and become their partner because of it. Spending $250.00 per name isn’t huge though for creating an online business if it’s a site you think you can promote or make money. I’d also like to see monthly reports rather then weekly reports and for sites that have been up for 2 months, it’s just too early to damn the entire process. Running totals for 2 years (just like a real business) give a must better overview. I bought Business.ht last month with the thought of making it a Epik site since “Business” gets over 2,000,000 searches a month. The first week, no traffic. This month I’m tracking 300 plus Uniques on Whypark.com. If I move over 2000 per month but the revenues aren’t there, I’ll either move it to Devhub (and I really like Whypark for development) to see how it goes and if Devhub works out, then might move it to Epik. One of the things I see happening for a business like Epik also should be a lower entry point since at some point Epik will want an exit time and the more sites under your company heading, the better chance of a strong cash out. Won’t matter if it’s $250.00 or $99.00 to enter, because all someone is going to look at it the value of the portfolio divided by 50%.

By: Mark Hoult

Mark Hoult — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:57:21 +0000

The CPC seems really low.

eg
ReclinerChairs.net paying $0.19
TennisRackets.com paying $0.11

Useful data – thanks

By: Netsite Domains

Netsite Domains — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:01:29 +0000

I disagree with your conclusions. Epik’s product store operation is not about premium domains making $xxxx per week, it’s about earning some cash from otherwise low value hyphenated dot nets and so on. My analysis of a break even point for investing in a product store with Epik is about $1-2 per week income as a starting point. But it depends on how long term you want to be. 2 years? 5 years?
(I am factoring in an assumption for visible and consistent growth due to SEO etc and future functions such as adding unique content etc.)
Everyone here seems to have overlooked the increase in value of domain names that are Epik powered. Once your site is earning $2 a week, that’s $100 a year. Now since your site is worth three or four times annual revenue or more, let’s say it’s now worth $300 and it’s now become a liquid asset and theoretically much much easier to sell. And that increase in value has paid for the $249 development cost.
My Epik store SilkSuits.org was launched only a couple of months ago and Epik got it to page one of Google. Congrats to Epik and partner Pyramid SEO. I don’t even check the stats every week, it’s usually about $1, this week it’s $2.38. Surely that’s a good result for this domain and site only a few months old.
So after one year, I might earn $100 from the site, and the site might be a saleable liquid asset worth $300 on Flippa or in an Epik sale. Cost: $249 + reg fee. Return?: $400 (100+300)… Year One: better than break even. Year Two etc: go into profit, $100+ p.a and rising.
I feel optimistic that this modest revenue will rise slowly but surely, especially once Epik adds content and graphic capabilities from webmasters and other functions as they plan to do.
Dave T

By: hairy.com

hairy.com — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 04:18:46 +0000

>>>>>> hairy.com 2726 visitors
>>>
>>> HAIRY’s traffics have been rising
>>> to over 10,000 per month

please let me add some thing

HAIRY’s traffic-upRises have
nothing
no-thing
no thing to do w/ epik

it’s caused 100%
by our own promotions @ twitter

b t w
:
if epik continue … … then v have more to disclose

thanks,best,2w

By: hairy.com

hairy.com — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 04:08:34 +0000

hi greeting

first thanks to domainstryker
for mentionning HAIRY

>>> hairy.com 2726 visitors

HAIRY’s traffics have been rising
to over 10,000 per month

thanks,best,2w

By: Dzinerfusion

Dzinerfusion — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 04:00:56 +0000

Great analysis, but like someone said, to play devils advocate, would you reveal how much revenue your sites make?

The only thing bad about epik is their price. You pay $250

By: roddy

roddy — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:09:17 +0000

Well if your not happy with parking this is something else to try, i like the way i can add links to the stores on my non ecomerce blogs

By: Snoopy

Snoopy — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:28:17 +0000

“So, roughly $19 a year profit per domain for the domain owner, if averaged out evenly across all the domains in the Epik network.”

The setup fee is $249 and you’ve got an $8 annual reg fee so I’d say it is never likely to be profitable for the average name on their system. For the people saying some of the domains are new revenue would still need to go up 5-10 times before this even started to look like a viable option.

In case it isn’t obvious people are buying picks and shovels with all this. None of these services are ever going to do much for you, it is just isn’t as simple as throwing someone $249 and hoping for the best.

Mike, don’t you run a similar service with just as bad results?

By: Louise

Louise — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:07:46 +0000

@ DomainStryker, it’s nice you compiled a list like this, but it’s missing date-of-launch & Google rank columns, so it’s inconclusive. Also, it would be nice to see an earnings summary per MONTH as opposed to WEEK, since most site earnings – including pay-per-click – are reported per month.

Please save the exact list, and report a year from now! Or I’ll save you the trouble, I’ll download the list and review it in six months; and a year. Likely many of these sites will increase in earnings. Newly-developed sites do not tell the true story.

Either way, thanx for analysis! I am quite happy ThickFoam.com [mine] as a developed site ranks page 1 of Google, and not-yet-launched Cheese-Board.com [mine] is alreay generating revenue!

By: Max Ciccotosto

Max Ciccotosto — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:38:48 +0000

Hi all,

this is Max.l CEO of Wishpot.

There are some good points raised in this thread. I just wanted to clarify some of the questions and issues brought up.

Revenue Share. The owners gets 50% of all the proceeds of the domains. This includes our CPC blend, direct CPC sales, adwords revenues, direct ad sales, and more. Owners actually get a report weekly/monthly with all the details down to how much each placement makes. It’s fully transparent. Some of the data is not reported publicly because we cannot (for example adwords rev cannot be shared per Google ToS).

Age of the domains. Many of the domains are actually less than two months old. Yes some domains perform better than others. I don’t think that’s news to anybody. It really boils down the the work that the owners are willing to put in. We provide many functionalities and keep providing more and more to enable owners to add value.

Affiliates. We actually baseline many of the properties on affiliates as well. Amazon of course and many of the 9000+ affiliate relationship we have. The fact of the matter is that affiliates vs cpc work better in different scenario, mostly around how close the visitor is in the buying decision making timeline.

Quality of traffic. This is indeed extremely important and it gets adjusted up or down. We want retailers to be happy customers. One of the functionality that we just rolled out is dynamic international redirects to local countries (we support UK, Germany, France and IT). Domains that perform very well are also consider for direct sales models that usually generated 50%.

Functionalities and opportunities. The platform is being improved as we go. For example the international traffic optimization went live last week. Owners can highly customize the communities. There is more coming for adding great content. There are more and more feeds going live which we’ll enable each site to be optimized dynamically based on traffic patterns/category. We are just at the beginning.

Hope I addressed most of the questions. If you have any direct questions or need clarification please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at max at wishpot dot com.

By: dcmike77

dcmike77 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:38:01 +0000

Big thanks for the feedback. Great to see someone come forward and report this. Keep up the good work

By: Anon

Anon — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:32:29 +0000

Would be interesting to total the column for amount earned for all the sites together and cut it in half to see how much Epik made this week.

By: muhammed

muhammed — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:27:57 +0000

Epik is using a 3rd tier feed from bizrate.com. They are paying you 50% of the revenue from generated clicks. No transparency on the google revenue and none on any affiliate related sales generated from wishpot (where Rob is a shareholder)… Transparency is only present on the measly wishpot revenue. Combine this with your $250 development cost and fast forward one year. I think you will see you will be standing in line for a refund based on their guarantee.. People, go to smartname.com and save yourself money. Same thing, it’s free and many more options for your to build your domain.

By: WQ

WQ — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:48:46 +0000

I was actually impressed with the earnings on a lot of those domains…most of them would not earn anything if it was based on type in traffic.

Turning a generic no type in traffic getting dotnet into a domain that makes $5-$15 a week is a goldmine.

Are you going to share your numbers here so we can compare?

By: James

James — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:59:35 +0000

I want to better understand how the whole thing works.
So Epik resells PPC product feed from Wishpot and keeps 50%.
Does Wishpot get that same feed from Bizrate/Shopzilla? What % does Wishpot keep then?
So Epic and Wishpot do not any value other than fluff?
Does Bizrate sell ads and originate the feed? What % do they keep?

I just looked up Smartname Shops; they get their feed from Shopping.com. Smartname gets 50% also?

I used to use a feed from Shopping.com a while ago. My experience was that merchants will only pay per click if these clicks make them sales. So they have a quality control and if your clicks do not result in sales, your site feed will be shut down. So at the end you end up making less that you would if you just got straight commission on sales. Or, another words, products PPC feed is just a gimmicky way to pay commission on sales.

On a related note, does anyone know if there is a quality white label solutions for clothing ecommerce?

By: Domain report

Domain report — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:46:52 +0000

How long have you had the domains with them, if these sites were just made traffic might build up with time. For the top names, those stats aren’t too bad for one week. I don’t think any one company can make all domains work, keep the best performing ones there and look for another platform for the names that aren’t doing well. I didn’t look at the rest of your list, but are the other domains good keywords and extensions that have a shot at getting traffic?

By: Leonard Britt

Leonard Britt — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:22:16 +0000

At first glance this would be disappointing. However, one must keep in mind that EPIK is less than a year old and most of those sites are probably only 3-6 months old. Many of my self-developed sites did little for six months or more. I have one site launched spring 2009 (Rutinas.tv) which over the last 30 days has more than three times the traffic it had just a few months ago. I have also seen rankiing progress on a number of other sites but again 90% of traffic goes to sites on page one. CTR for a PPC-dependent site is likely to be low single digits. You have to give EPIK credit for being transparent. Would you reveal the traffic and earnings stats of the sites you have developed for clients?

By: ShaneCultra

ShaneCultra — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:41:57 +0000

Kudos to the data. I have to admit that data ALWAYS does the talking. Now the next step. How do I do better?

By: Johan

Johan — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:29:50 +0000

Not very impressive numbers. But seeing that you’ve taken time to post 3-4 posts about the “Epik Fail” now, it would be fun to see a follow up post with some stats from SiteDepot-developed sites!

By: Deke

Deke — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:31:58 +0000

By my calculations, from your numbers, that comes out to roughly $27 a domain a year, after the 50/50 split, not subtracting the reg fee.

So, roughly $19 a year profit per domain for the domain owner, if averaged out evenly across all the domains in the Epik network.

By: Karni

Karni — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:31:05 +0000

Wow it it looks like you did a huge amount of work to gather and digest all this hard data on the Epik stores. Epik has become controversial in the domaining industry because claims have exceeded the gut instincts of other experienced domainers who seem to have experience with other parking services and with domain development.

These claims have been made in marketing hype and some blogs where they may have advertised. It is interesting now after many months to start see hard data compilation and analysis.

By: muhammed

muhammed — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:30:44 +0000

Mike, forgot to mention I will share costs to feature this post on domaining – The world should see these stats. Eighty percent of these sites earned less then $1.00 for the week. A simple click on a parking site generates more revenue!!

By: muhammed

muhammed — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:24:11 +0000

Genius! I was thinking of scraping the same data – Folks, the proof is in the pudding. This is what people can expect with epik. All you hear about is icecreammaker.com, however look at 99.9% of the results in the data sets. Wow, this speaks volumes! Thanks for the transparency epik!!