Let's see if I can answer this one. I seem to own a parking company.
Basically there are two large feed providers today, Yahoo and Google. I'm not sure why Bing isn't involved as well, since Yahoo gets a little more than 50% of their ads from Bing, but that's another discussion.
Yahoo has never directly had a parking company inhouse, but Google has and shut it down a few years ago. Basically they didn't like to deal with the customers.
Parking companies are basically the middle men for the ad providers, because they don't want to deal with the customers. If you only knew all of the stuff we put up with on a daily basis. Let's me give you a few examples from yesterday:
1. I know I used a fake paypal account to get paid, but here is my real one.
2. Why is my domain in a conflict? Is this like a domain war? Should I call my attorney? I'm really confused.
3. Why were my 10 clicks filtered? It wasn't me who clicked on them it was my daughter. You said I couldn't click on my domains, so I asked my family to click on them.
4. "I appreciate your time and detailed explanation, you've have succeeded in creating a three dimensional view with clarity in referring and referencing functions of compartmentalization appropriations in all understanding of all three parties that has become jointly to the 1st party to the third part."
Yes, #4 was actually part of a message that was sent to us. We get things like this everyday.
So how are we legally able to show ads from Yahoo/Google on a customers domain? We have contracts that allow us to do it. And if you read the Yahoo/Google TOS it says that they are allowed to show ads on third party partners. We don't have the same adsense feed or yahoo version of adsense feed that a normal person can signup for, these are domain parking feeds.
What does it cost to run a parking company? There are some parking companies with 3 employees, some with 10 employees and some with hundreds.
I've not heard of either Yahoo or Google giving out a feed in more than 3 years.
What does it take to get a feed from either Yahoo or Google? I talked to somebody a few months ago who tried to get one and they had more than 100,000 domains in their portfolio and they were told that the volume of traffic wasn't large enough.
It's funny when people talk about starting their own parking company, the amount of money involved to start up is insane. And your profit margin isn't as high as you would think it is.
Think about it this way, let's pretend there is only two car companies in the city you live in. There are 10 dealerships, who sell cars from company A, and 3 who sell from company B. Company A beats Company B in 80% of the cases, which is why there are more dealerships selling company A's cars. But they all have the same exact cars, same colors, same models, why would you choose one dealer over the other? It's the sales people, the customer service, the maintenance program, etc... To get more customers one dealer starts selling their cars at cost, but charges more for the warranty, so then all of the other dealers have to do something similar or risk going out of business. When you are selling the same car, you have to do something that makes you stand out, but in the end I promise you that as a customer you are doing very well because of the competition.
Donny