question Is Parking Really Dead or It Has Gotten So Different?

[Reyginus]

It is commonplace to hear people say parking is dead but I'm wondering if it really is, why do parking companies like Bodis still do it? Is it really unproductive anymore?

Is there something we are missing here? Has parking become different? Are there new rules? Are the few knowledgeable ones trying not to choke the business by selling a myth?

 

[privatereg]

I'm new to NP but not new to the domain monetization industry. Been parking since the mid-2000s. Parking most definitely is not dead, but is has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. Most people say parking is dead because they had a bad experience with it. But the biggest secret on why people say it is the ones that are making money with it don't want the competition. And no one is going to disclose their methodologies on how they find the right ones to purchase at auction because it drives up the price. Domain parking is a multi-billion dollar industry controlled mostly by large conglomerates that purchase hundreds if not thousands of expired domains a day. Back in the mid-2000s with the parked.com yahoo feeds individual investors could make a ton of money through arbitrage and other methods, but those days are long gone. If anyone wanted to get started today they would need a lot of capital to compete. All of us old timers have great stories about the hand registered domain that paid out $x,xxx in parking, but its extremely rare these days. One has to go to domain auction to get anything worth parking and even the ones that you could get for $20 now requires a high risk investment of at least $300 (and going up due to the large conglomerates that have no problem out bidding you with their API bots even to the point that goes beyond a 24x monthly time period to get a return on your investment).

 

[Whizzbang]

I define a domain worth monetizing as any domain that has at least 1 unique visitor per day.....seems low but you actually don't typically need more than that for it to be profitable.

Secondly, there are two things I looked at when building a portfolio many years ago. The first has already been mentioned here.....the ccTLD market is still completely under utilized while .com has been stripped mined. I made all my money in ccTLDs.

So which ccTLDs should you look for. This is the next point. I focused on those economies with large populations AND had a growing penetration of credit cards. Why credit cards you may ask? Simple, with credit cards users can purchase more easily online and it then means marketers can complete the entire purchase cycle of buying traffic right through to sale. This directly impacts Earnings per Click rates.

Also.....as an addition. Don't ever route traffic from one domain to another (or do any arbitrage) and hope to have it monetized by Google. You'll get your DRID banned and you'll effectively be unable to monetize traffic into the future.

I hope this helps people here out.

 

[biggie]

Parking only existed for generic type ins and you need enough targeted traffic from same niche to make a return minimum payout. If you try without enough traffic or try use brands your wasting efforts.

Hi

parking, was and is still available for "any" domain, if you choose to do so.
also, volume of traffic, may not be as important as quality of traffic and how that relates to EPC or earnings per click.

for instance last month at voodoo:
blankblank.com received 12 visitors and earned $37.33 in revenue
and another
blanketlyblank.com 26 visitors earned $4.69

parking is not like b4
in countless ways

Hi
not too much about domaining, is like it was before.
so many things have changed, physically and mentally within domaining.

conjecture and misinformation, rule many times over facts and figures.... but that's only because so many don't do fact and figure checking, for themselves.

they let others tell them what is, and what isn't.

imo....

 

[blogspotter]

There is no incentive for a parking monetization company to promote them, and there is no incentive for me to mislead anybody

For them it is unnecessary overhead if a bunch of newbies add non performing domains to their system, as well click fraud.
And for me it will only be more competition in finding my names.
There is no ulterior motive on making more and more people join the industry.

There are only a few things that have.
Auto Correct is one.
Chrome browser acting as search is another.

But there are still a plenty of people who are "Typing in the URL"
Google says that 10% of all queries have a spelling mistake.

It would be fair to assume that that much percent applies to type in as well.

And there are a lot more advertisers today than there was 20 years back.

Parking has changed but only evolved with time. It is as good as earlier meaning the business is as strong, if not stronger.

As everything else many things have evolved, but it is far from death,

Try bidding on traffic domains (not SEO ones) but typo domains and you will see.

I will give my latest example.
I was bidding on a good type domain couple days back, INSOMIA in king . It was a typo and nothing else and it went for 200 usd. I was waiting snipe it at 20 bucks, ready to go upto 50 and it went for 200.
If I had a Big portfolio I could have bought it but I didn't know how far the second bidder was williung to go and didn't want to make it hard for both of us.


Also,The Big players are playing on thin margins.
I have negotiated a buy a few portfolio and simply doesn't make sense from an Investment perspective unless they are doing a firesale.

Till 2 months back, I was at 1 dollar a day, today I am 5-6 usd average. By picking up type-in domains.

It may not be much but most of the Big parking guys now, make 30-40K per year from 1000 domains.
And they are asking for 36 months revenue for the portfolio. This is risky as an investment but the ROI is a lot better than Vanguard.

But if I build the portfolio on my own, it is not impossible and the risk is fairly lower. You need to make 1 dollar a month on a .com to make a profit. if you know how to look, you can build up.

 

[biggie]

Hi

it depends on who's putting a buzz in your ear.

i mean, if you read inside your own question, then the obvious says there must be some value there, when platforms continue to provide the service.

right?

read more threads in this section, and hopefully you'll get some clarity.

imo.....

 

[biggie]

that parking today is same as before

Hi

the process of parking hasn't changed:
simply point your domains to platform of choice, and wait for results, that's still the same.

what has changed, is the decrease in clicks for majority of type-in traffic domains and the overall revenue paid from advertisers.
along with the changes in advertisers who were paying for ads and their budgets.

i have a few domains that have earned ppc income for 14yrs, going back to 2006
and for them, above explanation is why they don't earn as much now, as they did then.

still, EPC for some domains remains high, and quality traffic from such names typically convert well.

imo.....

 

[privatereg]

There really are two parts to the "is domain parking dead" question. The back-end part is addressed eloquently in this thread by Michael (ParkLogic) and other posters, but that means you already have a domain that has domain monetization capabilities (or as Michael states in his Master Class - 1 human visitor is a traffic domain). To me the bigger question is "Can a newbie investor find domains that actually has ongoing traffic in today's market without tying up a large capital investment?". As I posted previously, for the most part large conglomerates have dominated the domain auctions so you need a lot of capital to compete or build a decent portfolio of ongoing traffic domains. So either the newbie investor needs a lot of cash (or credit) to find them (assuming he/she even knows how to analyze a domain's monetization potential), or go the pending delete route (forget buying domains that have passed that stage - I've yet to find one that is worth much - I'm sure some will argue with me that they find them all the time and have no problem saying they are better at it than me). So drop catching is the most economical way, but even that route has large players in the space.

 

[biggie]

I am doing parking-related experiment from last 2 months with more than 30 parking domains with good backlinks, search volume and authority and still haven't figure out those tricks.

Hi

backlinks must be checked to see exactly where the link is, on the backlinked page.
backlinks must be on websites that other people visit
any traffic originating from a backlink to a parked page, should be related to the keywording of that name.

also, when/if webmaster of site where your backlink resides, decides to remove it.....then poof, that traffic is gone.

search volume, does not equal actual number of visitors you may or may not get.
still, with search volume, a name with low volume, may produce better than one with high volume

authority, means nothing - imo

one of the tricks, is using common sense, to acquire domains that make sense, as domains.
instead of names that have to be explained or have extra "s" or the words are used in reverse like "loanhome" instead of homeloan

imo...

 

[evil]

It depends also who are you asking the question to ...

Is the recipient an owner of dictionary domains / typos domains / high traffic expired domains?
The answer of course is positive!

Is the recipient someone who wants to invest money & time to buy new domains?
There is lot of competition and great experience required!

 

[lock]

Parking only existed for generic type ins and you need enough targeted traffic from same niche to make a return minimum payout. If you try without enough traffic or try use brands your wasting efforts.

 

[alcy]

ita different in such way that 10 yra ago u could make 1000 per month easily... and now u can easily make nothing

that's why relatively speaking it is dead

of course this does not apply to the 0.1% people who still make 1000 or more per month.

stick to domain flips.

 

[alcy]

as for park companies... well...imagine running a business where people give u free hand with domains... and u got zero obligation to give them min park rev ... or u can pay them zero and they wont say a word either.. this way u can set a profit goal for yer company each month. always meet it ... and give rest to yer clients ...

 

[marijuanadomain]

not all parking platforms are the same....
I parked my domains like gxnx.com,zmmr.com,soundpain,onlinedrones.com at Sedo and others...get no clicks and no $$$
I parked at voodoo and now getting inquiries for my domains and $$$ per mth---go figure
I use Dan or Sav as the method of payment ....cheaper commission.
I switch platform after 90 days.

 

[Josytal]

I recently include my domains in our Ad network and here is my observation after three months:

1. Domain parking is still profitable if you can eliminate the "middle men" between you and advertisers.

2. Domains raking in highest revenue are those not so great for resale.

So, not every domain can be monetized through parking.

 

[privatereg]

There is no incentive for a parking monetization company to promote them, and there is no incentive for me to mislead anybody

For them it is unnecessary overhead if a bunch of newbies add non performing domains to their system, as well click fraud.
And for me it will only be more competition in finding my names.
There is no ulterior motive on making more and more people join the industry.

There are only a few things that have.
Auto Correct is one.
Chrome browser acting as search is another.

But there are still a plenty of people who are "Typing in the URL"
Google says that 10% of all queries have a spelling mistake.

It would be fair to assume that that much percent applies to type in as well.

And there are a lot more advertisers today than there was 20 years back.

Parking has changed but only evolved with time. It is as good as earlier meaning the business is as strong, if not stronger.

As everything else many things have evolved, but it is far from death,

Try bidding on traffic domains (not SEO ones) but typo domains and you will see.

I will give my latest example.
I was bidding on a good type domain couple days back, INSOMIA in king . It was a typo and nothing else and it went for 200 usd. I was waiting snipe it at 20 bucks, ready to go upto 50 and it went for 200.
If I had a Big portfolio I could have bought it but I didn't know how far the second bidder was williung to go and didn't want to make it hard for both of us.


Also,The Big players are playing on thin margins.
I have negotiated a buy a few portfolio and simply doesn't make sense from an Investment perspective unless they are doing a firesale.

Till 2 months back, I was at 1 dollar a day, today I am 5-6 usd average. By picking up type-in domains.

It may not be much but most of the Big parking guys now, make 30-40K per year from 1000 domains.
And they are asking for 36 months revenue for the portfolio. This is risky as an investment but the ROI is a lot better than Vanguard.

But if I build the portfolio on my own, it is not impossible and the risk is fairly lower. You need to make 1 dollar a month on a .com to make a profit. if you know how to look, you can build up.

Thanks for your summation of parking today. Definitely agree with you. The other day I was in a private auction on NJ where I thought I could get the domain for $1K. It got up to over $4K and I stopped at $4,999 because I didn't want to mess with NJ's requirement of paying via wire transfer. Still got outbid. Competition out there is fierce these days, my friend.

 

[Whizzbang]

Domain parking is definitely not dead.....in fact, it's alive and well. The best way to view this is to reflect on the "Gold rush" analogy. In the early days of the gold rush you could almost stumble across gold nuggets (eg. traditional parking) while today massive machinery is used to dig into the earth's crust to dig out the gold. It's a natural technological evolution that will continue moving forward.

I hate to say it but if you are taking the approach to parking that you always have then don't expect a different outcome. This brings up a differential in terminology as well....parking is typically placing all of your domains with a single provider that is backended by Google. Monetization is VERY different and exposes domains to the global advertising networks as well as Google. It is driven by a focus on maximizing the returns of every piece of traffic.

I actually go through this in detail at http://MCL.club as I find there is a LOT of confusion about domain monetization and whether it's worth it. MCL doesn't cost anything and I think you'll find a LOT of answers to the questions you're asking there. I hope that helps.

 

[blogspotter]

Since i wrote such a long post, I will add a few tips that I discovered in the past couple months:

Right now you will find better options in ccTLDs than .com not they ccTLDs are better but you will be able to find some unregistered gems.

many people still type in popular ccTLDs.
.ca, .fr, .de, .co.uk, .com.au, .in, .cn (for .cn you will need parking that provides advertising for china and I am not aware)

Avoid video domains. They usually have traffic, but the traffic will die down eventually.

regarding going upstream:
Of course going to a direct advertiser is will cut out the middle men, but then again, why do you neeed a service for that, if you have to go upstream.

I like Parking for low visit sites because they add up, and also they intelligently show relevant CPC ads, but if you stumble upon a winner by luck, the best way is to go to an affiliate network and find the best offer, test out different offers and if you have enough volume, even cut out the middle men and find the advertiser yourself.

But again, it only makes sense if you have enough traffic is a particular "niche".


I am a parking n00b, but I have been in the content site development for over a while I have done a little bit of online traffic generation, and monetization.

 

[blogspotter]

It is not much but it adds up and helps pay the renewal bills or a few close outs every month

Parking works as good as it used to. Only thing is that all the domains that are worth parking are taken.
But I have found some new ways

Oh, I have some more names with better parking revenue but I don't park for fear of UDRP.

 

[BrandChimp]

I used to make $1k a month with bodis and now I couldn’t even make $0.01... I tried sedo and I was making $0.20/day. Now I have switched to Uniregistry. Let’s see what happens after a month

 

[biggie]

I get to see domains with $28 CPC on ED and for days everyone avoids it like a plague. What could be the problem?

Hi
what you see, is not always what you get.

in udder werds....
until you own it, and park it or develop it and put adsense on it, then you'll never really know.

imo....

 

[AEProgram]

Best names in these days for parking are names that are either a common mistype that do not violate any trademarks or a domain that has real traffic coming to it from old listings.

 

[alcy]

I'm new to NP but not new to the domain monetization industry. Been parking since the mid-2000s. Parking most definitely is not dead, but is has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. Most people say parking is dead because they had a bad experience with it. But the biggest secret on why people say it is the ones that are making money with it don't want the competition. And no one is going to disclose their methodologies on how they find the right ones to purchase at auction because it drives up the price. Domain parking is a multi-billion dollar industry controlled mostly by large conglomerates that purchase hundreds if not thousands of expired domains a day. Back in the mid-2000s with the parked.com yahoo feeds individual investors could make a ton of money through arbitrage and other methods, but those days are long gone. If anyone wanted to get started today they would need a lot of capital to compete. All of us old timers have great stories about the hand registered domain that paid out $x,xxx in parking, but its extremely rare these days. One has to go to domain auction to get anything worth parking and even the ones that you could get for $20 now requires a high risk investment of at least $300 (and going up due to the large conglomerates that have no problem out bidding you with their API bots even to the point that goes beyond a 24x monthly time period to get a return on your investment).

perfect summary

I hope no one will mislead others any more after this..that parking today is same as before

 

[pablohc86]

I'm new to NP but not new to the domain monetization industry. Been parking since the mid-2000s. Parking most definitely is not dead, but is has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. Most people say parking is dead because they had a bad experience with it. But the biggest secret on why people say it is the ones that are making money with it don't want the competition. And no one is going to disclose their methodologies on how they find the right ones to purchase at auction because it drives up the price. Domain parking is a multi-billion dollar industry controlled mostly by large conglomerates that purchase hundreds if not thousands of expired domains a day. Back in the mid-2000s with the parked.com yahoo feeds individual investors could make a ton of money through arbitrage and other methods, but those days are long gone. If anyone wanted to get started today they would need a lot of capital to compete. All of us old timers have great stories about the hand registered domain that paid out $x,xxx in parking, but its extremely rare these days. One has to go to domain auction to get anything worth parking and even the ones that you could get for $20 now requires a high risk investment of at least $300 (and going up due to the large conglomerates that have no problem out bidding you with their API bots even to the point that goes beyond a 24x monthly time period to get a return on your investment).

very nice summary!
i agree with you. One of the biggest problem for beginners is that there are people with tons of traffic and they get paid better than what you will be so they can also pay more for the domains they want to acquire.

 

[Josytal]

could you elaborate a bit more your point 1?
thanks

a) Direct contact with advertisers.
b) Your Ad serving platform or server or ad display script across your parked domains or marketplace. All you need is just one website of yours to park the domains on - using name servers, CNAME / A records or 301 redirect. Nothing extraordinary.

For example, using the illustration below, I've jettisoned google and Sedo (and the likes):