The Myth of Mass Development

Fairy Tale

Develop all your domains in one go and beat your parking revenue ten-fold, sounds great doesn’t it? While it sounds great and for a few years there from 2007 – 2010 it seemed like it was possible it’s time to put this myth to bed. Sorry but you can’t mass develop your domains and watch them all become wonderful successful businesses.

So what happened and why is the idea of mass development still lingering?

In 2007 the sky fell for many Domainers who made a majority of their income parking domains. Now first, let me be clear. There are still plenty of people out there who do make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year parking. I used to think parking was dead until I looked under the hood and found out, holy shit, parking is incredibly alive and well…just for a very small group of people.

For the rest of the domain industry buying and selling domains is still the prevailing business model along with developing out one, two, or three larger sites.

When Domainers saw their parking revenue drop companies popped-up almost overnight promising investors a way to regain their lost revenue. Many people took the plunge only to find-out that every site is different and testing different monetization options was time-consuming and expensive.

I can’t tell you how many people I know who moved from parking to mass development and now are back to parking. It didn’t work. The dream was that along with better monetization options also came the chance to rank well on Google and get even more traffic, and more traffic meant more revenue. Google put an end to that pretty darn quickly.

Enter The WordPress Revolution

Boom! Then WordPress started to blow everyone’s minds and with WordPress multi-site the idea of running hundreds of blogs seemed like it could work.

WordPress development became the new craze. It’s easy, anyone can build a WordPress site, just slap on some affiliate ads and watch the money come rolling in, right? Wrong.

Once again investors found that while they could get one or two sites really cranking scaling this across their entire portfolio was not longer realistic…but the dream lived on.

Here’s the catch, the dream has stayed alive because their are companies that make money convincing Domainers that if they mass develop their whole portfolio then they will get more traffic and monetize better since they can now kick PPC to the curb. While you can make money with a handful of sites show me one domain owner with 500 sites all that are making good money, doesn’t exist.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t develop your domains, do it, make some real champions that make good money. Just know that the idea of building a real business on hundreds of domains might sound like a great idea but at the end of the day it’s the people building the sites that will make the money, not the domain owner.

Agree? Disagree? Comment and let your voice be heard!

Photo Credit: katmary via Compfight cc

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton