I have taken it upon myself to write a guide to domain parking for those who may be interested in using it as a method of making money through their domains.
The Idea Behind Parking:
Domain Parking is a method of capitalising on domains with traffic, but with no content. For instance, if you have purchased a domain name with traffic, but no website came with the domain, you can park it in order to capitalise on the traffic without having to develop the domain. Simply put, its another method of Traffic Monitization.
What is it:
Parking Partners (such as Sedo) host a pre-made website filled with advertisements on your domain. These advertisements are usually targeted to the specific keywords of the domain. For instance, if your domain is earlypoker.com, then advertisements will be targeted towards poker or gambling. Likewise, a parked page at parishiltonphotos.us would show advertisements related to Paris Hilton or celebrities. Some parking partners simply display advertisements from large external networks, such as Google Adsense, and some maintain their own network, such as the Roar.com network which Fabulous uses.
How it works:
Although parking partners differ, they usually adopt the same monitization model. The large majority of parking partners operate on Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Each time that a visitor to a parked site clicks on an advertisement, the owner of the parked domain receives a share of revenue. Some of that revenue goes to your parking partner (the company hosting your site), and the rest goes to the owner.
A small minority of parking sites use alternative monitization models. Some adopt affiliate programs, where in part of the revenue of a sale is shared with the domain owner. Depending on the revenue gathered per sale, the traffic to the parked domain and the rate of conversion of that traffic (how many visitors actually click on an advertisement and, in the case of affiliate programs, proceed to buy a product), this might bring in more revenue than the traditional PPC model. Yet, because this is rarely the case, and because of further disadvantages (e.g. it is very impractical for the domain owner and parking partner to track sales on the advertisers website; And the 'good faith' of advertisers to share their revenue is reduced when sales are both large in revenue but infrequent), PPC is more widely used.
Parking Partners:
Hope this helps!
Zach
The Idea Behind Parking:
Domain Parking is a method of capitalising on domains with traffic, but with no content. For instance, if you have purchased a domain name with traffic, but no website came with the domain, you can park it in order to capitalise on the traffic without having to develop the domain. Simply put, its another method of Traffic Monitization.
What is it:
Parking Partners (such as Sedo) host a pre-made website filled with advertisements on your domain. These advertisements are usually targeted to the specific keywords of the domain. For instance, if your domain is earlypoker.com, then advertisements will be targeted towards poker or gambling. Likewise, a parked page at parishiltonphotos.us would show advertisements related to Paris Hilton or celebrities. Some parking partners simply display advertisements from large external networks, such as Google Adsense, and some maintain their own network, such as the Roar.com network which Fabulous uses.
How it works:
Although parking partners differ, they usually adopt the same monitization model. The large majority of parking partners operate on Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Each time that a visitor to a parked site clicks on an advertisement, the owner of the parked domain receives a share of revenue. Some of that revenue goes to your parking partner (the company hosting your site), and the rest goes to the owner.
A small minority of parking sites use alternative monitization models. Some adopt affiliate programs, where in part of the revenue of a sale is shared with the domain owner. Depending on the revenue gathered per sale, the traffic to the parked domain and the rate of conversion of that traffic (how many visitors actually click on an advertisement and, in the case of affiliate programs, proceed to buy a product), this might bring in more revenue than the traditional PPC model. Yet, because this is rarely the case, and because of further disadvantages (e.g. it is very impractical for the domain owner and parking partner to track sales on the advertisers website; And the 'good faith' of advertisers to share their revenue is reduced when sales are both large in revenue but infrequent), PPC is more widely used.
Parking Partners:
- Fabulous:
This is one of the highest paying partners for some categories of names; for instance, mortgage names get around $9 - $12 per click on Fabulous. They run their own advertisement network (roar.com) which allows them to run some ads which other larger networks deny (adult, gambling etc.). A handy little tool for checking individual advertisement revenue can be found on www.roar.com (click on"Check bid prices").
It is not easy to get names accepted into fabulous. They are looking for high traffic names, and have asked many domain portfolio owners to test-drive their traffic first. You should usually present them with many domains at once, not just 20 or 30.
- Domain Sponsor:
This sponsor also gives high payouts (some being comparable to the high categories of fabulous). It is the choice of many domainers here. They allow auto-customizability, where the landing pages 'evolve' with each visitor to show the most targeted ads.
- SEDO:
Sedo runs a large domain selling website, and offers sellers (and other domain owners) the option of parking their domains with them. The benefit is that, if you are seeking to sell your domain at the same time, then you can centralise all of your domain activity on a single network.
Sedo has recently started a 'professional' parking service which returns greater revenue, but is only for high traffic domains.
- GoDaddy:
This domain registration company has started offering parking. You actually have to PAY THEM in order to show ads on your website. This dosen't make sense to most of us here at Domain Social, except that they are clearly trying to capitalise on new users who are not aware that most (if not all other) parking services are free.
Hope this helps!
Zach
