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Why Domain Parking works for me

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privatereg

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I was going to title this thread “How to Make a Million Dollars with Domain Parking” but I figured that would make a lot of people think it was click bait so I’m taking a different approach HAHA.

The reason I’m taking some time to write this (and more importantly taking up your valuable time reading it) is I get really tired of everyone saying Parking is Dead. Let’s see if you know one of these people:
  1. They never tried it – just like to troll the forums….
  2. They took 100 names they had lying around desperately trying to sell, and figured they’d try parking and it made $0.05 in two months.
  3. They have a domain portfolio from 5 years ago without ongoing reinvestment and watched the traffic, EPC, CTR and revenue die over time.
  4. They believe the registrars are faking the traffic stats at the auctions, the parking companies are keeping all the clicks, reporting falsified data, stealing your money and think it’s all a scam.
  5. They tried to game the system with fake traffic or 100 other methods (that I won’t get into) and got their accounts and domains banned (from DRID tracking), and now want to seek revenge.
  6. They have an inherent belief that domain parking is for “bottom feeders” of the domain industry and should be avoided at all costs.
So why am I posting this? I just want to put it out there that Domain Parking is a serious business and some are making substantial revenues with it even today. But one thing is for sure – it doesn’t work like it did in 2005 – you can’t just randomly pick a domain that looks good to you and expect to make money. And there is no lazy way to riches with domain parking anymore – those days are long gone. The big players know that it takes several hours a day of their time to research, buy, optimize and manage, and you have to do it every day of the year – no time off. But the good news is once you perfect a formula it actually works, and it’s a serious business for corporations and individual domainers alike, even in today’s competitive marketplace.

Before I go any further, I’m not going to tell you the tricks to find the right domain name that makes money and I’m not going to sell you anything nor offer consulting services for the simple selfish reason that it increases competition. This is not a business of “the more, the merrier” – that will clue you in on why you don’t see in the forums how to really do it (unless they want to sell you something). Instead I want to give you my experience with domain parking (since 2007 but more importantly in recent months) and why I think it’s still a viable business today for a select few.

So let’s take away the mystery and talk about it being a serious business. Like any true business start-up, you need capital, and with domain parking today you need lots of it. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of naysayers but one thing that has become extremely difficult is drop catching solely for parking domain monetization. It’s basically dried up – too many players and companies like DC dominating the market. Put another way, you’re basically out of luck finding that domain that’s going to make you hundreds or thousands of dollars through your own drop catching – maybe if you’re lucky you can cover renewal fees, but that’s about it (yes, I know there are exceptions…).

Buying someone else’s portfolio is out for most of us as well. With publishers demanding 30x or more of monthly revenue up front, and the requirement to purchase blocks of domains costing $xxx,xxx, isn’t worth it to me. And the traffic for many of these domains will die before you can break even (or worse, the traffic was faked and you’re screwed).

So that leaves you with the auctions which are far more competitive than years ago. And since domain owners have gotten smarter and registrars have made greater efforts to notify owners of upcoming expirations, what is leftover to go to auction pales in comparison to the traffic rich domains of the past. Those of us who battle in the daily auction houses fight against big conglomerates like HD for bread crumbs in most cases. Just try to find an expired government site anymore. And nothing pisses off a domain investor more than some lazy guy who does zero research and waits until they see a lot of people bidding on a domain so they can jump in at the last minute or someone who trolls the bids to drive up the price just for fun.

So that means the serious domain investor is going to pay more for these domains, and the price goes up every month it seems with longer time to recoup your investment. But in spite of these odds, one can still find domains that can recover your ROI in 12-24 months (or sooner if you’re lucky). That’s where the capital comes in. A serious investor knows that ROIs purchased at the auction house are not going appear for a year or two, if at all. Or to put it another way, if you think you’re going to get a domain at auction and start making a profit in a month, you’re probably wrong (or have a better system than I do!).

So after accepting the truth that your capital investment will be tied up for potentially years with a risk of losing some or all of it, there is the research aspect. If there are over 100,000 domains expiring every day (depending on TLD, gTLD, ccTLD), 7 days a week, 365 days a year, how would anyone know which ones to bid on. As I said before, I’m not going to tell you how but to say that investors in this space spend hours every day doing research in preparation for the next auction. To clue you in, that does not simply mean throwing some filters on expireddomains dot net and going after those (no disrespect to this great free service). If you don’t have access to resources to develop APIs to multiple link traffic source sites, develop some AI techniques, have a full understanding of keyword EPCs, prediction models to forecast the longevity of traffic through analytics, and a myriad of other considerations, your risk of losing capital rises exponentially.

Let’s say you have the capital and willing to risk it, and through trial and error have developed good algorithms to narrow your search and go after the types of domains that have historically yielded results – you’re done right? No, the hard work really begins now! You have to optimize your domains and manage your portfolio. I sometimes spend more time optimizing than all the other tasks. What do I mean by optimization? Some parking companies have contractual relationships to allow the parking provider to request related search terms that G will use. And yes, even that is shifting as G will now take your keywords as a “suggestion” and may use some or all of them depending on the historical traffic that has gone to that site before you bought it (using their massive data warehouses). Why go through all this trouble and just let G auto-optimize? Because in many cases it can take a lot of traffic before they get the terms right, IF they get it right, and your best opportunity to mitigate ROI loss is in first 60 days you park it before traffic drop (unless you have strong backlinks or are lucky enough to have a type-in or typo domain).

I don’t write all of this to turn you off to parking, but to say that gone are the days when anyone with $100 can buy some domains from their drop catching program, change the name servers and make money. But that isn’t to say parking today is not a viable business – just far more sophisticated.

One question often asked is “how much money can I make in parking?”. That’s a loaded question. I think the better question to ask is “what is my target annual profit I want to achieve in this business and when can I get there?”. Profit in parking would be your gross parking revenues less any chargebacks (I rarely have any, but it’s still lowers your revenue), less the cost of the domain, less costs to run the business (your time, subscription costs, IT charges, renewal fees and so on), less the predictive loss ratio of declining traffic, taxes, UDRPs (depends on your risk tolerance), and probably a few other things I can’t think of right now.

I’m not going to give you my annual profit target; I don’t want this to go on my permanent internet record HAHA.

I already know what you’re thinking right now…. “Yeah, talk is cheap – show me the proof”. I hear you. Just to let you know, there are many in this forum that are serious in this business and have no incentive to show any type of stats, myself included. It raises too many suspicions and follow-up questions – how many domains, what kind of domains, what kind of keywords, how long did it take, the numbers are fake, you name it. Who wants to be raked over the coals with all this grief? So contrary to my gut reaction not to show anything like most of the other guys, I would rather put myself out there to show that Parking is real, at least for my situation it is. So I attached a screenshot of stats for the past several months, and no they’re not photoshopped, whether you want to believe it or not – doesn’t matter to me.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/3965/PK0lIe.png

You’ll notice my traffic and revenues rising every month. So obviously I’m in a growth mode. To answer your next question on how long did it take to get where I am right now, let me give you a little personal history… In the late 2000’s I was making serious revenues with parking, but I got involved in other ventures and didn’t have the time to devote in keeping up with it. So I just let my domain traffic die a slow death for years. Eventually I was tired of running businesses and working 90 hours a week so I went back to the rat race, being respectable and making a salary in a normal job. What I quickly discovered was I had a lot of free time to think about other sources of revenue, and of course parking like the old days seemed like a good place to start. But I kept asking myself, “would it still work today?”.

So April of last year with the pandemic driving more people online and my employer telling us all to work from home, it became an opportune time for me to see if my old methods still worked. For the first couple of months I wasn’t buying many domains, but I quickly saw that with some tweaking and serious commitment of time the process still worked – worked back then and works now. Crazy. They were saying parking was dead back in 2010, maybe earlier and here it is in 2021 and it still works. Weird.

Let me be perfectly frank. I’m not bragging about this – far from it. In fact, depending on which side of the revenue fence you’re on, you might say what I’m achieving is peanuts to what you’re making, but I’m happy with my results so far. Long ways to go to meet my net profit target, but I’m confident I’ll get there.

I’m sure I’ll hear from a lot of people telling me “you’ll never make any real money with parking – selling or leasing is the only way, or developing your website with affiliates or adsense, or zero click direct traffic advertisers, or smart traffic switching”, you name it. And I say to all of that is if it works for you – great! I’m not talking about that – I’m just making a point about domain parking in today’s world, pure and simple. I enjoy it and you’ll never convince me it’s dead.

So let the haters weigh in but at least I got this off my chest…Domain Parking is real folks!

P.S. Please don’t IM/DM/PM me trying to sell your traffic domain, join a JV, try a new monetization service, ask for my methods, more details on my portfolio, etc., etc. I will not respond – no offense.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
@namemarket ,
You mentioned 'SEO ranking',
afaik, SEO ranking loses ground every day a domain is parked. Maybe I missed something in what you said though.

All in all (and that's from *my* experience only),
if a domain has low clicks, that's due:

a. random visitors that arrived at the lander page by mistake

b. traffic is not what you think it is.
eg. From time to time, I get domains that their traffic has all reasons to click A but they click B. I expect traffic to come from A and instead it comes from B, etc.

Maybe the visitors when the domain was an active website received completely different visitors than when it got parked due to some ranking weirdness (eg. appearing in the searches of a different country while getting lost from the original country the domain received traffic from).

c. domain attracts uninterested visitors to interact with the website

d. script blockers/AV software. Those are the worst as they are usually responsible for when you receive traffic but no clicks (visitor sees just a blank page or a page with no ads)

and finally,
e. traffic from HTTPS. I think Bodis have implemented a way for that traffic to be usable but it wasn't before. With other services, only worthy domains can use https traffic.

maybe you need to do a re-check on your domains to see what really is the problem, maybe you missed something along the way when you optimised the keywords.
 
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@Hypersot and @namemarket,

You both have great points about related searches optimization.


I don't have much experience with optimizing the related searches yet but from what I have tested and analyzed, I see so far that G is optimizing the related searches mostly according to the domain name and not it's past usage or traffic.

Just for example, if I have a domain that is named “fashquotes.com” and I know for sure that it was used for a fashion niche website. In most cases, G will show related searches to quotes. Things like “car insurance quotes”.
Even if I enter related search keywords in this fashion niche, they won’t be shown.

Another example, if there is a domain name with just a random name, let's say “blababc.com” and I know for sure that it used to be a pets niche website.
For that domain, G is showing random high paying related searches, for example "life insurance quotes".
Even if I will insert keywords related to the pets niche G won't show none of them.

I believe that if you acquire domains based on their names, for example: “lifeinsurancequtes.com”, then you will be able to use your own related searches and optimize it well.
But, if you focus on growing traffic and not caring so much about the names of the domains (like myself), then it becomes a problem to optimize the related searches according to domain's past usage.

This is the data I collected so far from my domains and from the related searches experiments I have done.


I have to say something about that:
e. traffic from HTTPS. I think Bodis have implemented a way for that traffic to be usable but it wasn't before. With other services, only worthy domains can use https traffic.

I see so many parked domains that are not using SSL certificates, those guys, you have no idea how much traffic you lose when you are not capturing all the https incoming traffic.
Regardless of the domain parking provider, everyone can and should use a solution to capture all https traffic.
 
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I don't have much experience with optimizing the related searches yet but from what I have tested and analyzed, I see so far that G is optimizing the related searches mostly according to the domain name and not it's past usage or traffic.

That's not entirely true.

For years now, the vast majority of domains I acquire are high traffic domains.

One thing I've noticed is,

if the domain's traffic is focused,eg. people that want to watch movies online (which is by far the most commonly acquired domain type these days)
and
if the traffic is high enough
then
be sure that the domain will, in a very short time, show the correct keywords on the lander.

You'll be surprised how domains -that their name has nothing to do with watching movies- suddenly show the best 'watch movie online' ads

The only time I found that a high traffic domain shows random ads is when the traffic is unfocused and totally random.
When that happens, I try to place the domain on a platform that has a wide range of direct ad feeds / Zeroclick (my preference is Parklogic in this case)
 
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One thing I've noticed is,

if the domain's traffic is focused,eg. people that want to watch movies online (which is by far the most commonly acquired domain type these days)
and
if the traffic is high enough
then
be sure that the domain will, in a very short time, show the correct keywords on the lander.

I completely agree with you, that is something I have seen on many domains.

On the other hand I have also seen, for example, if I have a high traffic domain named “fashionforwomen.com”, G can show "Stream Online Free" in one of the related searches between the fashion keywords.
If I try to optimize the related searches with fashion keywords only, even if all of my keywords are super relevant to fashion and past use, G still shows "Stream Online Free" even though the domain has nothing to do with streaming.

That is why I had the impression that you can’t really control the related searches and G does whatever they think is more profitable even if it’s not related to the past usage of the domain.

That is what I see with my domains but I will have to invest the time to investigate and experiment more thoroughly.
 
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@Shayne ,

pretty sure that fashionforwomen domain had really a messy history with domain being used many times, for a short while for different things.

You should not forget however that, the visitor that visits the lander is very important.
If I check from my PC without any vpn or a clean browser, I will get shown all sort of irrelevant ads due to my constant domain research.

What I do is,
I use a clean system (Windows 7 or Linux on Virtual Box)
with a VPN (Private Internet Access)
and I visit the domains I need checking from the location I believe the traffic will come from (PIA has a wide range of locations)

It's the only way to be sure.

btw. I'd love to hear if anyone has a different method of checking landers.
 
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Good point, it's definitely a possibility.

I did try VPN + incognito and I also tried browsing from a clean windows server on GCP US data center.

But again, I didn't do a thorough investigation on the matter yet.
 
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I don't have much experience with optimizing the related searches yet but from what I have tested and analyzed, I see so far that G is optimizing the related searches mostly according to the domain name and not it's past usage or traffic.

Just for example, if I have a domain that is named “fashquotes.com” and I know for sure that it was used for a fashion niche website. In most cases, G will show related searches to quotes. Things like “car insurance quotes”. Even if I enter related search keywords in this fashion niche, they won’t be shown.

Another example, if there is a domain name with just a random name, let's say “blababc.com” and I know for sure that it used to be a pets niche website. For that domain, G is showing random high paying related searches, for example "life insurance quotes". Even if I will insert keywords related to the pets niche G won't show none of them.

I believe that if you acquire domains based on their names, for example: “lifeinsurancequtes.com”, then you will be able to use your own related searches and optimize it well. But, if you focus on growing traffic and not caring so much about the names of the domains (like myself), then it becomes a problem to optimize the related searches according to domain's past usage.

This is the data I collected so far from my domains and from the related searches experiments I have done.

I have to say something about that:

I see so many parked domains that are not using SSL certificates, those guys, you have no idea how much traffic you lose when you are not capturing all the https incoming traffic.
Regardless of the domain parking provider, everyone can and should use a solution to capture all https traffic.

Hi Shayne, by coincidence was in the process of writing a long and very similar post to your own about the same subjects and issues. Since you already posted it no need for me to post it.

I totally concur with it, for example, I recently parked one of my best names which was used as a financial trading site for over 10 years and listed that way in the search engines. I carefully entered a series of closely related financial market terms.

4 or 5 ads were very good about trading and stocks, etc however the page was in-effect ruined by the 2 or 3 non-sensical ads about home chef cooking, vegan meals and buying hemp oil, having nothing to do with either the domain name or its previous use.

So upon seeing the non-relevant ads the visitors thinks the web-page is of no value and/or is a domainers parked page, making clicks very unlikely as he quickly exits the page.

And about non-https status. It's of course a negative either from traffic loss, or when a visitor sees the open padlock non-secure message and immediately exits thinking it may be a virus.
 
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Hey @namemarket,

That's exactly what I mean! Thanks for confirming that you see it too.

I can't share screenshots so I will just copy and past my example, this is a "fashionsomthing.com" domain name and these are the related searches it shows after I inserted only completely relevant keywords that are matching the URLs the traffic is coming from and past usage:

Womens Dresses
Womens Clothing
Womens 70s Fashion
Womens Fashion
Bride Dresses
Womens Clothes
Most Popular Content Management Systems

As you can see, the last one is totally unrelated and is something G experimenting with many domains from what I see.
They use 1-2 spots for high paying unrelated related searches.


And about non-https status. It's of course a negative either from traffic loss, or when a visitor sees the open padlock non-secure message and immediately exits thinking it may be a virus.
If you will take it one step farther, you can redirect all http traffic to https and none of the visitors will see the open padlock non-secure message.
 
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In the end of the day , I wonder if the @privatereg is profitable?
 
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In the end of the day , I wonder if the @privatereg is profitable?
Fair question. When I got serious again with parking last April, I treated the business like a start-up company. Like any new business, this would require capital and since I am self-funding this I was prepared to start out in the negative. I had an idea what I wanted my ultimate annual net profit to be in three years so I developed a business plan on what it would take for me to get there.

I came up with a budget for purchasing ‘x’ domains daily and have made some tweaks along the way, but the past few months with few exceptions the purchase volume has been steady. So now, I have almost a fixed expense for purchasing and a slow increase in renewals for new domains offset by any that I’m not renewing.

As of February I’m about a 40% monthly net profit for that month (before taxes) and I’m on track to hit 70% monthly profit by December. By the end of next year, I should be over 90% net monthly profit. Profit increases for me month to month because the gross revenues go up and my fixed expenses rise very slowly. This is due to the fact that my daily expenditure for purchasing domains will not change substantially (as it is achieving the desired revenue growth), taking into account increased renewal rates, increased auction prices, etc. So far I consider this business model a successful business venture especially for a side hustle HAHA.

I attached the latest screenshot of monthly gross revenues. Although it looked like February dipped a little it was only 28 days in the month (versus 31 in January). March in the first 5 days is doing better than expected. That may be because a lot of my domains are seasonal. For example, if I have a golf site located in the northern part of the US, it will do better as we move into the spring and dormant in the winter.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/8776/UfkZKS.png
 
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Fair question. When I got serious again with parking last April, I treated the business like a start-up company. Like any new business, this would require capital and since I am self-funding this I was prepared to start out in the negative. I had an idea what I wanted my ultimate annual net profit to be in three years so I developed a business plan on what it would take for me to get there.

I came up with a budget for purchasing ‘x’ domains daily and have made some tweaks along the way, but the past few months with few exceptions the purchase volume has been steady. So now, I have almost a fixed expense for purchasing and a slow increase in renewals for new domains offset by any that I’m not renewing.

As of February I’m about a 40% monthly net profit for that month (before taxes) and I’m on track to hit 70% monthly profit by December. By the end of next year, I should be over 90% net monthly profit. Profit increases for me month to month because the gross revenues go up and my fixed expenses rise very slowly. This is due to the fact that my daily expenditure for purchasing domains will not change substantially (as it is achieving the desired revenue growth), taking into account increased renewal rates, increased auction prices, etc. So far I consider this business model a successful business venture especially for a side hustle HAHA.

I attached the latest screenshot of monthly gross revenues. Although it looked like February dipped a little it was only 28 days in the month (versus 31 in January). March in the first 5 days is doing better than expected. That may be because a lot of my domains are seasonal. For example, if I have a golf site located in the northern part of the US, it will do better as we move into the spring and dormant in the winter.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/8776/UfkZKS.png


WoW
 
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Here’s a question is it to late to get into the game?

I had a restaurant name domain that made $150 in about 13 months.

Is this bad faith to use a restaurant domain?
 
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Fair question. When I got serious again with parking last April, I treated the business like a start-up company. Like any new business, this would require capital and since I am self-funding this I was prepared to start out in the negative. I had an idea what I wanted my ultimate annual net profit to be in three years so I developed a business plan on what it would take for me to get there.

I came up with a budget for purchasing ‘x’ domains daily and have made some tweaks along the way, but the past few months with few exceptions the purchase volume has been steady. So now, I have almost a fixed expense for purchasing and a slow increase in renewals for new domains offset by any that I’m not renewing.

As of February I’m about a 40% monthly net profit for that month (before taxes) and I’m on track to hit 70% monthly profit by December. By the end of next year, I should be over 90% net monthly profit. Profit increases for me month to month because the gross revenues go up and my fixed expenses rise very slowly. This is due to the fact that my daily expenditure for purchasing domains will not change substantially (as it is achieving the desired revenue growth), taking into account increased renewal rates, increased auction prices, etc. So far I consider this business model a successful business venture especially for a side hustle HAHA.

I attached the latest screenshot of monthly gross revenues. Although it looked like February dipped a little it was only 28 days in the month (versus 31 in January). March in the first 5 days is doing better than expected. That may be because a lot of my domains are seasonal. For example, if I have a golf site located in the northern part of the US, it will do better as we move into the spring and dormant in the winter.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/8776/UfkZKS.png

Since you have shared your revenue numbers freely, can you also share what your total acquisition cost of this portfolio has been?
 
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Here’s a question is it to late to get into the game?

I had a restaurant name domain that made $150 in about 13 months.

Is this bad faith to use a restaurant domain?
i don't make numbers like privatereg but i'm into parking by at least a decade....

it's not to late to get into the game if you can plan to have at least a low 6 figure budget for acquisitions and for your catching setup.
Why a low 6 fig budget?? Because in order to keep things profitable you need to have a special revenues share from parking providers and you can get that only (99,9% of the times) showing them quality and huge traffic.
An example: the domain you mentioned making 150$ in 13 months could make 200$ or more in a portfolio owned by a big parking guy.

about the restaurant name, they could make legal issues to you if they are still open.
Btw from the ethic standpoint if the restaurant is still in business, it's wrong trying to take advantage in this way.
Big parking guys would reply you: it all depends by your risk tolerance. Normally restaurant domains are very low risk.
 
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@privatereg What's your domain like? one word? two word? exact match?
must .com? or must english word?
I'm very curious :xf.grin:
 
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Hi @privatereg

You said in an earlier post "My fear is one day G may disallow all forced related terms, but hopefully that will be years away..." As I'm sure you already know by now "Related Search Terms can no longer be forced. Our Tier1/G ad provider is only taking the top 1-3 seeded keywords into consideration right now. The remaining RS terms tend to be broader, with relevancy improving over time." - bodis support team. How have you been coping with these changes? has your CTR dropped as a result?
 
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Congrats , And Thanks for The Share ,
 
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Posting here to come back to later

Thank you OP, happy to see a well typed thread about this.
 
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If I buy a domain with a 100$ epc and get a lucky click, how much would I make (what will be my % cut)?

Do you think that domain parking as we know it now will change in the future (for the worse)?
 
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Quality domain with a quality traffic will not deteriorate in the future. you will still be able to use it, for example, on affiliate.
 
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Quality domain with a quality traffic will not deteriorate in the future. you will still be able to use it, for example, on affiliate.
So, if will not deteriorate it means that the actual models like dp will not change in the future?
And for example, could google change the way domains work right now? (Like something they will do that will drop the value of a domain)
 
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If I buy a domain with a 100$ epc and get a lucky click, how much would I make (what will be my % cut)?

Do you think that domain parking as we know it now will change in the future (for the worse)?

I don't think anything will change in the near future. but it is necessary to focus on quality domains which are becoming less and the price is still higher.
 
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I don't think anything will change in the near future. but it is necessary to focus on quality domains which are becoming less and the price is still higher.
I think the real challenge is to have a good quality domain with lots of type-in traffic and a reasonable cpc
 
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If we cant force related terms on domains, a financial domain regardless of traffic has to contain financial keywords or Google with display what it thinks is correct?

I think my portfolio is affected by this, I just notice a lot of unrelated keyword on my landers.

@privatereg did you get affected by this?
 
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Related Terms are allowed.
Master keyword is deprecated by Google.
 
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