As you most likely have heard by now – Sedo is offering a new parking service called Sedo Pro. Targeted towards "Domain Professionals", rather than just accepting any old domain they want to know about your portfolio and the kind of traffic your names receive.
With any new service I like to see the first round of reports before deciding whether to jump on the bandwagon or not. I’m glad I did this with Sedo Pro as the results so far look to be a disaster.
A post in DNJournal yesterday from a Sedo Pro user tells of the sad story as he watches his revenue shrink to nothingness. [Read Full Post]
One of my favorite posts in this thread reads:
"Why didn’t I listen to myself when I said, "Don’t do it!"03/09/08
55 Views
1 Clicks
2.00% Click rate
$0.09 $/Click
$0.09 Revenue"
As the thread goes on the problem is discovered – Sedo’s new auto-landing algorithm is failing to pick the right parking page for the domain. It seems that the automatic keyword selection is very off-target. Thus, entire portfolios that once earned a nice monthly revenue suddenly take a steep drop.
The
Sedo Pro user here had a medical billing site that made close to
$10/month. Once he switched to Sedo Pro the parking page showed links
for Dinnerware and Fiestaware!
Here comes the crazy part – Sedo says that it can take between 1-4 weeks for these landing pages to adjust. This means that you might have to lose an entire month’s revenue just to use the service. If you’re making $x,xxx a month with parked domains this is not a hit you’ll want to take.
To me it would seem that Sedo Pro would fail to deliver on it’s #1 mission as a parking service – to provide a way for domainers to effectively monetize their domains. Making a service for "Domain Professionals" means catering to a crowd that might make over $xx,xxx on parked-names. Asking them to sacrifice one-month of revenue seems like a steep cost.
