Parking, it has become a bad word in our industry as more and more Domain Investors look for ways to grow their revenue. People were making money hand-over-fist until 2007 when the sky fell and parking became a much more challenging way to make money. That being said, I still know plenty of people who make five-figures/month parking so if you think nobody is making money parking, think again.
For me domain parking has been a great way to pick development candidates. Not only does parking give me valuable data on the kind of type-in traffic my domains are getting, but I can also see how that traffic turns-into revenue for the advertiser. The other day a single click on one of my domains brought in $2,500 for one lucky advertiser, but a mere $5 for me. Still a $5 click is nothing to be upset about, in fact, it should be a sign that you could be making more with that particular domain.
I park just about every single domain name that I don’t have developed and have a few favorite services (listed in no particular order):
- TrafficZ – great interface, detailed stats, lots of different landing page designs. They’ve also been around for a long time and have a team of developers that are constantly working to improve the system.
- DomainApps – this used to be called WhyPark and it’s a very innovative platform that is really somewhere in between parking and development. You can add some great interactive features that allow you to make a site that is truly useful to your visitors.
- DomainSponsor – run by Oversee, there’s a lot of technology running behind the scenes here and they are constantly innovating. Now that Oversee is no longer running Moniker and Snapnames they have even more time and focus for DomainSponsor so I expect even more things from them this year.
- SmartName – this is a parking service run by popular domain listing service Afternic. They make nice pages that don’t look like your typical parking page, and you can get 5% cash-back if you park and sell a domain through Afternic which is a nice plus.
I use a simple formula for determining if a domain name I have parked would be a good development candidate. If the domain makes more than $5/month I pull it off of the parking service and develop it. Typically I can increase the revenue by 5x-10x pretty quickly and once it starts to rank well in Google it only goes up from there.
So if you’ve been avoiding parking like the plague, you might want to give it another chance, you might be surprised what you learn about your domains! Of course if you have domains with strong type-in traffic parking can still be a very good way to monetize thousands of domains, like I said, I know people making five-figures/month parking so there definitely still is money to be made in parking itself, it just takes the right kind of names!
