So, what does a 'parking company' ...

[HeavyDuty]

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you?

1) They have free use of your domain name
2) They have free rein with your hard earned traffic
3) They collect PPC monies generated by the above

In return, they provide what?
1) A few templates
2) Bare bones hosting

I find it quite odd and quite curious that the dn owner can't include any type of tracking. Which would be a very simple piece of script. A simple 1x1 pixel image would easily do the trick.

Hosted mini-sites rule IMHO. It requires some work, much more than just reging a dn for $8 bucks and parking it.

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you? That you can't do better for yourself?

So you list your name for sale with one of the 'big dogs', and park it there. Is that where end users look for domain names? Do they make any attempt to market the names?

Do a search on,
"the best <your choice> domains"
"where can I find <your choice> domain names?"
"<your choice> domain names"
"I want to buy an <your choice> domain name"

You'll see how aggressive their marketing is. Cherry pickers, nothing but cherry pickers. Fabulous will turn up on occasion, SEDO even less, all the rest are 5-10-50 pages deep in SERP's.

Just curious, what's the attraction? , inquiring minds want to know.

Regards,

 

[robertjr]

Just curious, what's the attraction? , inquiring minds want to know.

Fast and easy:imho:

I'm quite sure I will never find the time to develop more than 10% of my domains into "mini sites" and likely no more than 2-3% to "real" sites. Thus, Fabulous, NameDrive & Etc.. are my friends.

 

[geb9696]

I dont have time to develope all of the domains that I have regged at this current time so I have them parked at sedo. It is fast and easy. My goal is to constantly be turning more of my domains into developed sites but until I can get around to them I just park them.

 

[ALGDomains]

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you?

1) They have free use of your domain name
2) They have free rein with your hard earned traffic
3) They collect PPC monies generated by the above

In return, they provide what?
1) A few templates
2) Bare bones hosting

I find it quite odd and quite curious that the dn owner can't include any type of tracking. Which would be a very simple piece of script. A simple 1x1 pixel image would easily do the trick.

Hosted mini-sites rule IMHO. It requires some work, much more than just reging a dn for $8 bucks and parking it.

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you? That you can't do better for yourself?

So you list your name for sale with one of the 'big dogs', and park it there. Is that where end users look for domain names? Do they make any attempt to market the names?

Do a search on,
"the best <your choice> domains"
"where can I find <your choice> domain names?"
"<your choice> domain names"
"I want to buy an <your choice> domain name"

You'll see how aggressive their marketing is. Cherry pickers, nothing but cherry pickers. Fabulous will turn up on occasion, SEDO even less, all the rest are 5-10-50 pages deep in SERP's.

Just curious, what's the attraction? , inquiring minds want to know.

Regards,

Everything you describe takes work on your end and the resulting revenue from that work is a HUGE question mark. let's say you spend 20 hours to develop a few domains and 5 hours each month on maintenece. six months from now is the revenue you've generated (minus the cost for your time), more or less than you could have received from a aprking company, with 1 total hour of involvement?

Boils down to opportunity cost to me.

That's my $.02

 

[vinodkv]

but now a days, parking companies are paying some revnue share to people who own the domain, but the problem here also, we didnt know how much they are making...

 

[Christopher Hunt]

What are they making? - that is the problem. And where there is a problem, there is opportunity. If a parking company just provided 2 simple things;

1. audited, transparent traffic tracking

2. higher levels of customization (i.e., simple if that is all someone wants, but more sophisticated if desired)

There would be an absolute rush to that service.

 

[Donny]

Larry,
I can't comment on all of your issues but let me talk about a few of them. I am the CTO of Parked.com, it is version 1 of my vision of what a parking company should be. It could be better and it could be worse.

I find it quite odd and quite curious that the dn owner can't include any type of tracking. Which would be a very simple piece of script. A simple 1x1 pixel image would easily do the trick.

Most parking companies aren't allowed to have the end user place content on the site, this is because Google, Yahoo, MSN, and whoever else always wants the page to be exactly the same everytime. We did offer the option for people being able to add outside stat tracking during our beta phase but we removed it for 2 reasons, sometimes the stats tracking was slow and the page wouldn't finish and some of the counters just didn't make sense. We have always provided full logs of all hits, clicks, 404's and searches that were made on a domain that was with us if anybody has a question. But if people are really interested in adding some additional code to their page, I'll add something next week.

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you? That you can't do better for yourself?

They should be able to get you a better deal than you can get using Adsense. I don't have a google contract, but I still know what a lot of the google partners get from google. And if the google parking companies paid you a decent % they would blow away what you are getting creating portals or what I like to call text based tgp's. I know we blow away what anybody gets paid via YPN, almost triple if I remember correctly.

I'll stay out of the selling domains part, I only believe in buying domains. Anybody interested in cameras.com?

Donny

 

[advaita]

Artful the sites look good but what a re the cots involved? Are you sure you'll get your money back, as presumably you have to pay for hosting too?

 

[harkster]

Sometimes it goes the other way. I just moved one of my names from mini-site to PPC. The traffic was ok but clicks kept going down. The parking company has a page which fits well and in 1 day there clicks exceed the total for rest of the month. As not all PPC sites are good for every name sometimes PPC can be better than a mini-site for some names.

I am not sure how parking sites receive traffic but I am convinced it is not all 'typein' but somehow via searches.

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

Artful the sites look good but what a re the cots involved? Are you sure you'll get your money back, as presumably you have to pay for hosting too?

Well, if you buy just one site it is $19.95 and there are volume discounts down to $9.95 each when you buy 50. Not bad for a 500 page site. As someone said in another forum: "it's worth it just for the customized banner graphics".

Check out their site at: PPC-Sites.com .

No, I'm not sure I'll make my investment back - there are no guarantees in this world - but it looks really hopeful so far.

Sometimes it goes the other way. I just moved one of my names from mini-site to PPC. The traffic was ok but clicks kept going down. The parking company has a page which fits well and in 1 day there clicks exceed the total for rest of the month. As not all PPC sites are good for every name sometimes PPC can be better than a mini-site for some names.

I am not sure how parking sites receive traffic but I am convinced it is not all 'typein' but somehow via searches.

Yeah, I know what you mean - different strokes for different folks (or domain names in this case). I do have a couple of domains that are suddenly picking up steam at 1Plus.net (a kind of mini-site/parking service). I can't explain why! I haven't touched them in months, but I'm not complaining, mind you!

One of the things I have learned in this domain game - you can't rush to judgment. You have to be patient. Don't jump to conclusions on ANY situation in only days or weeks. It often takes months for domains to hit there stride.

 

[spinoza]

Larry,
I can't comment on all of your issues but let me talk about a few of them. I am the CTO of Parked.com, it is version 1 of my vision of what a parking company should be. It could be better and it could be worse.

Hi Donny,

Can you comment on the most important one?
You guys dont tell us how much money you make...and you wont say how much you pay...

 

[Donny]

We tell all of our partners what we pay them. We aren't allowed to say how much we get, because that's in our contract. We even print what we start people out on our flyers we pass out at shows.

We have a field like this that all account managers can see and tell people what there percentage is.

Payout Rate: 75.00%

We have another scoring system that tells us when to give people raises or in some cases lower their payout rate. But nobody would understand that scoring system except for the person who wrote it.

Donny

 

[HeavyDuty]

I appreciate your response Donny. I guess every domain owner will have excellent reasons for their choices.

In regards to tracking I certainly understand banning the use of JavaScript trackers. The reasoning behind not allowing a 1x1 image for tracking simply doesn't 'wash'. It has zero impact on page load times or visual appearance. If the image server fails the page still loads flawlessly, just not the image.

PHP trackers, when done properly, don't hinder page loads either. Allowing PHP could open the door to huge problems though.

Does parked.com feed traffic to parking pages in any manner?

Again, thank you for responding.

Regards,

 

[Donny]

Larry,
Let me explain a little more about the external javascript counter. We took out own portfolio which is quite large and first ran it without any counter for a week and our overall revenue was x. Then the next week we added google analytics and our overall revenue was about 4% per day. This didn't make sense to us at all. So the next week we decided to to flip flop it on and off each day and everyday we had it off we did better than it was on.

We had other customers verify this during beta testing. It baffled me.

One other issues is what's a hit and what isn't. A hit to a front page is always a hit to me. A unique is a unique visitor to a domain per day. A search is a search a click is a click. Is a spider whether it's a SE spider or a crap spider a hit? Is a 404 a hit or not? Or is it a hit when they do something? We evaluated almost all of the parking companies before we went live trying to determine what everybody does to count hits. Every company does it a little different, but in the end the only thing that matters is how much money did you make. In the morning when I look at our final numbers, I rarely ever look to see how many unique visitors we had, all I ever care about is how much revenue we generated.

Does parked.com feed traffic to parking pages in any manner?

Sorry, I'm not sure I completely understand the question.

Donny

 

[HeavyDuty]

I'm sorry you lost 4% of your traffic for three weeks to find out javascript counters cause page hangs. You should have called

Ummm ... I totally disagree with not being concerned with the number of uniques. Gross dollars are certainly what we are all chasing. However, if I have 300 uniques and only 1 click-thru, even if that one click paid me $10,000, I would want to know what happened to the other 299 surfers. And what I could do to my presentation to induce more click-thrus.

Are you the celebrity on YouTube? http://youtube.com/watch?v=ofOmqMGkfuY

Regards,

 

[Donny]

What we lost in that little trial would have paid a 1.5 full time people for a year. I'm just saying I would never use an external counter again.

I never said I'm not concerned about uniques, the problem is what is a unique? Most people don't know all of the crap they get everyday. We had 1 domain yesterday that got 75,000 broken image calls, so is that 75,000 unique visitors or is that just crap? How about search engine spiders, is that a unique visitor? How about non-search engine spiders? RSS feeds? Javascript calls? People think a 404 is an html page but it can be so many other things.

But you said it right, "what happened to the other 299 surfers". All of the stuff I mentioned above is not a surfer to me. If somebody goes to the front page or even a 404 and does certain things I know if it's a surfer or not and I will count that as a surfer. Otherwise, we don't.

Yes, that was me during the cameras.com auction.

Donny

 

[Christopher Hunt]

What we lost in that little trial would have paid a 1.5 full time people for a year. I'm just saying I would never use an external counter again.

cool. you answered the 'how much do you make' question.

let's say 40K for 1 full time position. 1.5 = 60K

60K is losses for 1 week + 3 days (1 week of counter 'on and off). so your 4% losses during the experiment (10 days) were 60K. The remaining 96% revenue for 10 days would be 1.5 million. 4.5 million a month? wow. I don't think so, though. if so, wow.

 

[HeavyDuty]

"Most people don't know all of the crap they get everyday."

Those eleven words speak volumes. Server logs are our only unbiased friend. They provide tons of information but we never really know, it's all in how we interpret it. Like your example of the 75,000 image hits, I can make a guess but that's all it will be, a guess.

We agree on all points Donny. I'm still not sure what a parking company can do that I can't do for myself. Other than supply templates and volume hosting. I'm sure your(plural) advertiser contracts pay much more than what I have access to. But if you(plural) keep half the revenue then what's my incentive to park? Other than templates and hosting?

Don't take my questions as demeaning Donny, they're not. I just can't wrap my head around most parking plans. What am I failing to see?

I appreciate your willingness to share your thoughts.

Regards,

 

[Donny]

munkybrain - Your math is pretty good, it's a little high, but not much. Wow, I need a raise! Remember that was also during our alpha/beta testing phase.

Larry - One thing you have to remember is all parking companies are different. Each can do certain things, but most of us are playing on the same field. So what can I do better than the company next to me with the same information. That's the thrill from our end, how can we be better than somebody else.

I can't make you understanding a parking site, I can't even explain it to my mom. Then again she clicks on some of our domains all of the time without even knowing it. I can tell you that with *most* parking companies you will get a much higher revenue share than if you did it yourself with a mini portal. We use multiple providers so when company X doesn't have any results for country Y we go to company Z and get results. I pay you every two weeks, how often does google pay you? If I had the time to develop all 20k of my domains I own, I may not park them.

One thing you said was that we keep half. For yesterday we kept 16.82% across the board so this means we paid out 83.14%, some accounts got more, some less, but that is our overall number for yesterday.

Donny

 

[HeavyDuty]

... One thing you said was that we keep half. For yesterday we kept 16.82% across the board so this means we paid out 83.14%, some accounts got more, some less, but that is our overall number for yesterday.

Half was an exaggeration on my part. So, can you share the average per click value for the 83+% payout? And the division of page types warehoused? ie: 34% are portals, 66% are 1-click

 

[Donny]

I knew what you were trying to do, I had that figured out after the second post. I don't even know how many 1 click to two click pages we have. But I would say it's probably the opposite of what you have. We just don't track what's a 1 click vs 2 click, it's not really worth it to us. I won't go into a debate about 1 click or 2 click because my head would explode since so many people would argue against what I had to say.

Donny

 

[HeavyDuty]

I won't debate 1-click/2-click either. I use 2-click nearly exclusively, historical data has lead me to that format. That applies only to me and my dn's, not to everyone or anyone else. As they say, results may vary.

What I'm 'trying to do' is discover what a parking company can do for me that I can't do for myself. It's a simple question that should have a simple answer, or so I thought. Trying to read between the lines is unnecessary brain strain Donny, because there's nothing there to read.

As mentioned by geb9696, ALGDomains, and robertjr, mini-sites can be a huge workload. In my particular case the tech side of creating, maintaining and hosting is a non-issue. Not everyone is in that same boat.

The GNU(free) CMS tools and 1000's of free feeds that have cropped up make 1-5 page sites quite easy, even for the 'technically challenged'.

I'm still at a loss though, what can a parking company do for me that I can't do for myself?

Regards,

 

[harkster]

Hot Damn Guys

That discussion is IMHO a most interesting/informative read.

 

[robertjr]

That discussion is IMHO a most interesting/informative read.

Ditto! Enough in fact to persuade me to sign up at Parked.

 

[HeavyDuty]

Thanks for your input and sticking with this thread hark. You too mentioned your pro/con opinion and experience using splash pages vs traditional parking. I neglected to include you in my previous post, Sorry .......

I sincerely doubt there is a simple answer to my simple question. I'm not sure there can be. It speaks highly of Parked.com to participate in an open forum with an unknown. But not highly enough to grant them free rein with my domains and hard earned traffic.

My original question has yet to be broached. Or am I the only one who noticed that?