Recently ABC News ran a story in which it featured the reporter using the ParentConnect.com website. Humorously, ParentConnect.com is not a real website. It is a domain name “parking page” that the domain name owner is using to generate income from his or her domain name which has not yet been used to build a traditional website. This example illustrates how parking pages have attained such a higher level of quality that they can easily be mistaken for a destination website.
I have used several domain parking services over the years to help monetize unused domain names. Recently, I read an article about Sedo winning the Domain Name Wire survey as the best parking service, for the second year in a row. In the survey, about 48% percent of the responding domainers voted that Sedo is the best domain name parking program. That percentage is up from 32% last year.
According to the survey, the top parking services are:
1. Sedo 48%
2. Name Drive 19%
3. Parked.com 13%
4. DomainSponsor 5%
5. Fabulous 5%
6. Active Audience 2%
7. Skenzo 2%
8. TrafficZ 2%
Other parking companies received 1% or less of the vote.
I was impressed with this survey because (1) I felt the domainers who read Domain Name Wire and voted in the survey would be very qualified to identify the best domain name parking service, and (2) Sedo won the survey by such an impressive margin.
Although I have used Sedo to buy and sell domains in the past, I had never considered using their domain name parking service. Based on this resounding vote of confidence from the survey, I decided to give Sedo’s domain name parking service a try. So, more than a week ago I moved more than 100 domain names to Sedo to test their domain parking service to see if it would better monetize these unused domain names.
With Sedo’s parking service, most of the optimization controls are given to the domain name owner, such as selecting the keyword for the ads shown on the site, selecting a related image for each domain, and selecting related keywords. Most other domain name parking services automate this customization process, selecting the keywords through a computerized system. Sedo’s customization requires much more time to set up each domain. However, as I have gone through this customization process over the past week, the revenue generated from Sedo’s parking service has dramatically increased as my pages have become more targeted to the keyword of that domain name.
Sedo’s parking solution still has some issues to work through. Their system has an annoying pattern of changing the capitalization of words that are not correct. The domain name owner should have the ability to set the capitalization of the domain name and keywords. Also, there is no ability to block specific ads for unwanted sources to appear on the domains. The Sedo system is pretty good about not showing unsavory ads where they are not wanted. However, somehow two of my domains were selected as “adult” and started to override my keyword ad selection instead of showing adult-themed ads. I asked Sedo if there was any way to mark domains or my entire portfolio as “do not show adult ads”. They do not have that option yet, so I had to remove those two domains from the Sedo parking program.
For me, the increased revenue definitely outweighs the additional customization time, and the additional issues. The customization makes the domains feel like a targeted web destination for that topic, and are much more effective in generating advertising revenue. I trust Sedo, and believe they will work through the other issues in time. I only wish I would have known about Sedo’s parking service years ago.
What domain name parking services have you used, and what has been your experience with those services?
Posted on May 14th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Domain Names
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