Domain Name Parking — in a Nutsell
These days, domain name parking services are abound — a quick Google search indicates 5-10 popular services and many other web sites offering the service. Upon further research (and my own experience), I determined not many people have luck parking their domain names with a service. Others, and myself are lucky to get more than 25-50 cents per day. And I have over 100 domain names. Not to complain because the earnings definitely rival most US-based savings accounts but one can do better and the cost/benefit doesn’t weigh out with each domain name costing somewhere in the range of $7-10 USD.
Of all the services, you’ll have the most luck with one allowing you to optimize the content/ads displayed on your domains. Traditionally, the most successful domains are B2B related so you’ll want to concentrate on these ones as they will pay out better — in most cases, again, with my own experience and reading feedback from others on domain parking. Some of the best domain parking services are GoDaddy’s domain parking service, RevenueDirect.com, Google’s new domain parking service (through AdSense), Sedo.com and SEOparking.com. The later is setup in an interesting format — it takes more time to setup the domains but the end result allows you to display blog entries of your choosing on your web site on a WordPress blog. Clever format but as a rule of thumb, I always like to have original content on my web site. WordPress blogs do have excellent SEO capabilities however, as long as you don’t abuse SEO principles, etc.
If you want to consider running your own domain parking service you might want to take a look at a program called Domain Trader. Looks like a great program but you’ll want to take a good look at this before moving ahead and purchasing. I haven’t used it because I’m not sure if the $$ income benefits would be worth the investment based on my experience in this area. Some of the sites the software developer mentions no longer appear to be active as well, for what it’s worth. You might be able to find a few other ‘out of the box’ programs available on the web and another option might be to develop your own system, perhaps just to serve your own domains on your server or virtual host account.
NamePros.com is an excellent resource where people who are in the business of domain name parking share ideas and feedback. If you are new to this area, you may find posting forum inquiries on the site beneficial. The Lazy Domainer is another good resource but is setup in ‘infomercial’ format — does have some nice information however.
Pending review/approval from your legal department (or sole legal advisor), if you do not use your domain names presently, I strongly suggest you consider domain parking options. If you don’t your domain registrar tends to collect 100% from ads displayed on your temporary parked page by default (if applicable, but usually the case with GoDaddy for instance, at the time of this writing). You may or may not collect big $$ from this, but it will at least help you gauge which domains might be worth developing first based on pageviews, ad clicks, etc. your domain parking service you partner with may report.
I personally park my domains with RevenueDirect.com not necessarily because of the payouts (it is about the same as others*) but because of the vast amount of reporting available. My thought process is in the time being, rather than have my domains not pull in any $$ at all, I’d at least be making some money — as Ben Franklin once said “a penny saved is a penny earned” can be applied to some extent here. My second motive is having a gauge to help me prioritize plans on developing the domains on my own — perhaps a simple web site at first displaying Google AdSense ads.
*Interestingly, in my review of various domain parking services, I noticed the ads displayed tend to always be the same. My thought is the services must be utilizing Google’s AdSense API for customizing the look and feel of the contextual ads displayed on parked pages.
