Is parking dead?

[mpls]

Hi guys, in your opinion, is parking dead?

Look at my last month screenshot, there are a lot of days with clicks and $ 0 revenue. 3 clicks and $ 0.01....

My stats:
CTR: 1.5% (LOL)
RPC: $ 0.01 (LOL! But only when I'm lucky! Otherwise 3 clicks $ 0!)
RPM: $ 0.11 (Seriously??? 1k user to earn $ 0.11? $ 0.11??)
Last month earning: $ 0.09 (LOL!!!!) .

I suppose I'll move away all my domain from parking companies and redirect them to sedo/uniregistry/afternic landing page.

This situation does not make sense.

 

[decades80]

I would not say ist dead, but preety much alive. I am still getting 10 - 50 USD clicks on a daily Basis.

 

[alcy]

I would not say ist dead, but preety much alive. I am still getting 10 - 50 USD clicks on a daily Basis.

its debatable if being in the 1% of prking revenue in the planet where you are, makes the whole thing an "alive" or a dead thing

 

[decades80]

its debatable if being in the 1% of prking revenue in the planet where you are, makes the whole thing an "alive" or a dead thing

I am not in top 1%. In top 1 percent are guys having Domains which make 100+ USD per day each

 

[alcy]

I am not in top 1%. In top 1 percent are guys having Domains which make 100+ USD per day each

ok let me widen the margins...

its debatable if you being in top 10% of park revenue on the planet, makes the whole thing pretty dead or pretty alive.

I guess in similar way that you do not call population of the world rich, and wealthy and financially independent for life.. just because ~1-5% of all people are milionaires.

 

[decades80]

But anyway it seems PC revenue is going down the drain for me. They use to be top 3 Providers, but now they are last 3.

 

[iAchilles]

I'm totally with you!
I really appreciate Donny replies but I also agree that a parking serive/ feed providers should be more transparent with customers, especially the one with better traffic quality.

IMHO they must provide more data like:
1)where the traffic come from, what is the % (showing the backlink url if it's type in or search or social) and which ones bring clicks
2)which ads are clicked and how much is the actual CPC
3)what the poeple search on the parking lander page
4)from which countries the traffic come from and what are the countries who click on ads

and some other data.


I know that some parking services already provide a part of this data and that parking companies cannot disclose certain data for security reason but again...I think that customers need more transparency, especially the ones with a good reputation matured years after years.

At the moment parking is just: i send you my traffic and you give me something without letting me know nothing about how you calculate the revenues.
if this is not good for you, you can change to another service.

Parking companies and feed providers should collaborate to be transparents with customers, everytime we ask something about RPC or so on the answer is just: we don't have a reply from our feed due to security reason.....or something similar.

The ads providers seem to be the less transparent..

+1

More data helps us optimize our traffic or the best result, which in turn makes the parking companies more money.

 

[toughdomains]

@biggie if there is any alternative to parking out there we should be discussing it. ....
Im trying to see if there is any service or solution that can be better than 1 cent. If we can crack this nut we all win.

Ill provide an update on our efforts to get paid more on domain traffic.
We researched and spoke to about 10 different ad networks. We actually integrated a few that were easy to be approved and would auto recognize any domain. We also tested a bunch of parking and networks and in the end we discovered the following.
1. most networks dont want parking traffic or any domain traffic in any capacity because it tends not to convert for their advertisers.
2. even with good domains networks wanted to place crazy criteria on names like less than 50k alexa rank

Most if not all networks we spoke to only wanted premium quality traffic from only top sites. But heres the deal if every network just wants the top 50k sites then that would means every other site on the web is worthless. I will say we have a whole new understanding of how parking companies work hard and run many different ad network partners to generate as much as possible but its the nature of the site not being developed that makes the traffic worthless to ad networks.

We just dont agree with that and we continue to work on a solution that will create value for the names you have and the traffic for those names. Both solutions we have adsense and running your own affiliate have worked well for our tests and our clients. Adsense generates 5 to 10 times the revenue on domains and affiliate banner rev numbers are all over the place. both options are promising and generate more than a few cents.

We all need to discuss a new way it has nothing to do with promoting a service. parking revenue keeps declining and I dont see it getting better esp with new crypto options like BAT - basic attention coin.
We all know what doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results in.....

I would suggest we continue the conversation here and try to figure this out because I am personally disgusted as a media buyer. On the buy side I cant purchase traffic for less than 50 cents and to be receiving 1 cent is insulting.

 

[toughdomains]

The reason we don't publically say what the number is that it's not allowed for us to publically state what that number is. It's in our agreement with our upstream ad provider.

Donny

@Donny are you not allowed to state what the ad provider gives you or what you provide your clients. I would think that you an still provide your clients cut without disclosing the ad providers cut to you. How is godaddy able to disclose what they provide? they use many of the same parking providers? Remember there are a lots of hands in the pot. the advertiser pays $1 then the ad network has a split with parking...lets say 60% parking company 40% ad provider.
that leaves 60 cents then parking company takes a cut of that 60 cents. lets say thats 50/50
the domain owner would end up with 30 cents. I think that number would be respectable...but in most cases I am seeing 1 to 6 cent payouts on clicks.

 

[NitroJunkie]

1. most networks dont want parking traffic or any domain traffic in any capacity because it tends not to convert for their advertisers.
2. even with good domains networks wanted to place crazy criteria on names like less than 50k alexa rank

Thanks for sharing this. Very informative...

@Donny are you not allowed to state what the ad provider gives you or what you provide your clients. I would think that you an still provide your clients cut without disclosing the ad providers cut to you. How is godaddy able to disclose what they provide? they use many of the same parking providers?

I also agree on this. It is the internal decision of the parking company to decide on the percentage of the cut. Your decision on the cut from the domain owner has nothing to do with the agreement between the parking company and the upstream provider.

 

[frank-germany]

We actually integrated a few that were easy to be approved and would auto recognize any domain.

easy to be approved stuff is usually easy
as it doesn t work
or is new on the market

 

[frank-germany]

are you not allowed to state what the ad provider gives you or what you provide your clients.

thank you

very very good point


buying traffic from adwords
is much more expensive then 10 years ago
or 3 years ago

so parking income must have had gone up

in terms of cpc on a keyword domain
maybe traffic would be lower
or CTR would lower due to ad blocks
but cpc must have gone up significantly

 

[Donny]

@Donny are you not allowed to state what the ad provider gives you or what you provide your clients. I would think that you an still provide your clients cut without disclosing the ad providers cut to you. How is godaddy able to disclose what they provide? they use many of the same parking providers? Remember there are a lots of hands in the pot. the advertiser pays $1 then the ad network has a split with parking...lets say 60% parking company 40% ad provider.
that leaves 60 cents then parking company takes a cut of that 60 cents. lets say thats 50/50
the domain owner would end up with 30 cents. I think that number would be respectable...but in most cases I am seeing 1 to 6 cent payouts on clicks.

Correct, we are not allowed to say what revshare we get from our upstream ad provider or what we pay our customers publicly. Welcome to the world of deal with companies that you can't "quickly" implement.

And I don't think anybody would still be in business if a parking company kept 50%.

Donny

 

[frank-germany]

Correct, we are not allowed to say what revshare we get from our upstream ad provider or what we pay our customers publicly. Welcome to the world of deal with companies that you can't "quickly" implement.

And I don't think anybody would still be in business if a parking company kept 50%.

Donny

you mean only 50% ?

 

[Donny]

If a parking company paid out only 50%, the domainer and the parking company would be out of business.

Donny

 

[frank-germany]

If a parking company paid out only 50%, the domainer and the parking company would be out of business.

Donny

for the domainer
its mostly the case anyway ..

 

[Cdomains]

A shadow of what it used to be.

Only a few with the right names are still doing OK.

 

[Donny]

Nobody makes what they did 15, 10, or 5 years ago. All of the clicks from bots are no longer paid, which is one of the biggest things that changed.

As far as payments go, if you think you are only getting 50%, go ahead and continue to think that. At least with us, we make less than most states sales tax.

Donny

 

[SpareDomains]

Do you see domain parking company consolidation happening?
Do you see more domainers doing their own "Sales Pages" like myself and a good handful of new companies coming out strictly focusing on the sales lander angle with no mention of domain parking?

Fact is most earnings come from a small percentage of a domainers portfolio unless they built their entire portfolio strictly based on parking earnings. So if your buying your domains strictly based on parking earnings then park away as your entire portfolio has traffic then. If your buying your domains based on sales potential then 2002-2003 when I started kinda made sense to park everything as earnings were high, today's numbers a fraction of many years ago.

So today's advice would be park them all for a few months, keep the earners on parking and anything not making income go straight to a sales lander as a domain sale for xxx-xxxx trumps many months/years of a few cents a month. Almost all of the domains I've sold over the last 14 years in the xxxx range really made no significant parking earnings as end users don't care. If your solid on I gotta park everything even if no earnings then at least use a company with a noticeable sales link at the top of the page and not buried at the side or bottom among a sea of ppc text links and get them all in distribution networks https://www.afternic.com/domain-reseller-network etc... as they don't need to point there for sales to happen.

 

[toughdomains]

easy to be approved stuff is usually easy
as it doesn t work
or is new on the market

The problem we ran into with all ad networks we spoke to was

1. none of them wanted to deal with any of our customers. they wanted to pay us and have TD pay our customers. We really wanted to provide a direct pay option but its nearly impossible.

2. they wanted to approve domains before entering their network or cherry pick only best names with traffic

3. many ad networks would reject our referrals based on having no similarweb or alexa rank. In some cases our own corporate site and blog was rejected.

4. any network that was easy to sign up to or approved all names gave out 1 cent CPM (not 1 cent cpc but cost per thousand)

We basically gave up working with any ad network provider because they just wanted to take too much and provide too little....It was just more of the same pricing with parking and we are looking for something better.

so I completely understand why parking CPC are so low. Either you take the penny or you get nothing..it may suck for those making $4 per month but if you have 10k clients making $4 per month its $40k a month or $500k a year. Anyone that has traffic and doesnt sell it direct gets the lowest rate possible.

.We made more with running affiliate banners across test domains.

So we are now moving in the direction of being our own domain ad network....

We are complately integrated with double click ad server and now can serve ads across all our silver accounts.

Since affiliate ads convert on our test names I am confident there are advertisers out there that would want to have their feed on our developed pages or their ads across our members domains. After building critical mass we can offer to share that revenue.

Imagine a place where you could control the rss feed and banners on a domain for a few months on a name that you cant afford but would love to get exposure on. Now imagine two advertisers bidding on a price to control the ads on that domain.

 

[toughdomains]

If a parking company paid out only 50%, the domainer and the parking company would be out of business.

Donny

yeah if parking could simply cover the reg fees I would continue to renew. (even the bad ones)

parking covers about 10% of my reg fees so forced to drop or eat the cost year after year.

I would say for ~90% of domainers, parking revenue is completely irrelevant to their business or bottom line.

and for parking companies Im sure that 10% of our customers generate the most traffic and revenue.

there is either no easy alt option or they are in the penny is better than nothing camp.

 

[toughdomains]

Do you see domain parking company consolidation happening?
Do you see more domainers doing their own "Sales Pages" like myself and a good handful of new companies coming out strictly focusing on the sales lander angle with no mention of domain parking?

Fact is most earnings come from a small percentage of a domainers portfolio unless they built their entire portfolio strictly based on parking earnings. So if your buying your domains strictly based on parking earnings then park away as your entire portfolio has traffic then. If your buying your domains based on sales potential then 2002-2003 when I started kinda made sense to park everything as earnings were high, today's numbers a fraction of many years ago.

So today's advice would be park them all for a few months, keep the earners on parking and anything not making income go straight to a sales lander as a domain sale for xxx-xxxx trumps many months/years of a few cents a month. Almost all of the domains I've sold over the last 14 years in the xxxx range really made no significant parking earnings as end users don't care. If your solid on I gotta park everything even if no earnings then at least use a company with a noticeable sales link at the top of the page and not buried at the side or bottom among a sea of ppc text links and get them all in distribution networks https://www.afternic.com/domain-reseller-network etc... as they don't need to point there for sales to happen.

I would personally rather advertise banners of my domain portfolio like this guy did here
skuf.com

The problem is you need an easy way to develop and run banners on hundreds or thousands of domains (something we just solved with our ad network)

And control the content on the domain and run affiliate or adsense or our own company than get paid a fraction of the cost. The domain traffic is much more valuable than what people currently receive from parking. We are currently also researching crypto solutions where people pay micro payments to you if they like something your hosting.
https://basicattentiontoken.org/

There will soon be a disruption...

 

[SpareDomains]

I would personally rather advertise banners of my domain portfolio like this guy did here
skuf.com

I've run text ads and banner ads across my entire portfolio for many years. Some to my own sites as I have quite a few developed sites and some from affiliate networks. Reason I tend to prefer my own sales pages as although I dig some of the sales page companies out there Efty etc... you never have 100% control unless their on your own servers which mine are. If your doing sales pages over domain parking the sales page angle still needs to be #1 and ads added as non obtrusive in the sidebar or footer. The skuf page is nothing more than an automated rss feed page that were popular in like 2006, that ship has sailed as there is no unique content there so no lasting value especially in Googles eyes. So it's either domain parking or sales page or sales page with clean ads. The auto generated mini site angle won't end well as there is zero effort into unique content and a strategy that worked like a decade ago.

 

[Donny]

Domain Parking consolidation is just like anything else, some companies will start to make less money and will need to sell before they go out of business. And some companies will get purchased because they will complement something somebody else does. And in some cases, companies will lose their feeds and just kind of disappear.

We make $0.00 on sales pages, but we still spent close to 2 months of time creating a sales system that integrates with escrow.com. We allow people to sell their domains via their own escrow system, our built it, or however they want and we make nothing on it. It's just a feature we have. So if people want to offer a sales system or for sale pages, the more the merrier.

We don't have the 10%/90% rule, ours is 32%.

Every domainer is different, every domain is different, it just depends on what you want to do. Some very large domainers, have to sell domains every month to cover their costs. Some have to do that and some don't. At the end of the day it's whatever works best for you.

Just remember that not all domains are designed to be parked, I hundreds of domains that don't pay for themselves each year, but they are each for $10k or higher. But I'm not interested in selling them and I don't have to sell them. I have one domain that makes about $1k in a single month once every 3 years, if I was just looking at a single point in time I wouldn't renew it, but since I look at multiple years I know exactly what's going on.

Donny

 

[ResoluteDomains]

I've run text ads and banner ads across my entire portfolio for many years. Some to my own sites as I have quite a few developed sites and some from affiliate networks. Reason I tend to prefer my own sales pages as although I dig some of the sales page companies out there Efty etc... you never have 100% control unless their on your own servers which mine are. If your doing sales pages over domain parking the sales page angle still needs to be #1 and ads added as non obtrusive in the sidebar or footer. The skuf page is nothing more than an automated rss feed page that were popular in like 2006, that ship has sailed as there is no unique content there so no lasting value especially in Googles eyes. So it's either domain parking or sales page or sales page with clean ads. The auto generated mini site angle won't end well as there is zero effort into unique content and a strategy that worked like a decade ago.

When you say "your own servers which are mine", do you mean your own hosted virtual servers or physically your own servers in your home or office?

 

[toughdomains]

I've run text ads and banner ads across my entire portfolio for many years. Some to my own sites as I have quite a few developed sites and some from affiliate networks. Reason I tend to prefer my own sales pages as although I dig some of the sales page companies out there Efty etc... you never have 100% control unless their on your own servers which mine are. If your doing sales pages over domain parking the sales page angle still needs to be #1 and ads added as non obtrusive in the sidebar or footer. The skuf page is nothing more than an automated rss feed page that were popular in like 2006, that ship has sailed as there is no unique content there so no lasting value especially in Googles eyes. So it's either domain parking or sales page or sales page with clean ads. The auto generated mini site angle won't end well as there is zero effort into unique content and a strategy that worked like a decade ago.

we have users pulling in feeds for a certain category of their names. So if you have 10 drone names they are writing unique content for drones then pulling them into all their drone names. rss was created long time ago but still the best way to display and automatically update content across many domains...if you had 1000 names it would take you years to develop them one at a time we provide a way to host and develop thousands of names in a few minutes with your own unique content or content that others write or a mix of both...it was no easy task to build and most of our users have a news page in addition to a sales page. i would argue that an rss feed on a page with affiliate links is better than the default registrar page or a parking page but if you disagree its only a small part of what our system can do to help manage and sell names...keep your names parked or at the registrar and use our store with hosted sales pages...or redirect the traffic to any url..Everything is hosted for you so no need to deal with servers, uptime or hosting or server maintenance. However if you can run and manage your own servers and have the time then thats also a great option...esp if you sell hosting I could see why you would push a self hosted option...