The Parking Cooperative Idea

[VURG]

I remember reading recently about Frank Schilling made a comment on his blog (I can't remember where) that people with smaller collections of domains would be smart to join their domain name collections together and acting as a Cooperative group, giving more bargaining power to maximise the revenues on their domains.

This gives leverage to minimise the profits of the middle men (Sedo, Namedrive, etc...) who provide the software and take large confidential percentages of the parking traffic for themselves and also gives more opportunity to work directly with the advertisers. In theory, groups like Google and Yahoo could also be bypassed as well to allow domain owners to get 100% of the traffic.

Are there existing Parking Cooperatives?
How would the integrity of a cooperative be preserved to avoid members of a cooperative who will use unfair ways of generating traffic?
Is this easy to achieve or too much work for too little?

 

[Keynes]

Well, the primary issue here is that there are lots of intricacies in trying to scale, most related to traffic quality assurance. In theory, this might be a good idea but, in practice, there are lots of difficulties. We can look to Bodis as an example of this: it's an inherent moral hazard where individuals have an incentive to cheat the group where possible, requiring a strong system of checks and balances. Further, it's certainly not easy to get a Y/G feed at this point, unless you have a very strong set of high-quality domains, and, even then, that may not do the trick. The software and administrative costs of such a project are also high, so keep that in mind. Your idea of circumventing the search engines really doesn't take into account that's where the bulk of advertisers are, and unless you can make a strong case that the traffic on your new service converts quite well, I'm guessing most advertisers would stick to the big 3. The idea of 100% rev share seems nice, until you understand the realities underlying such a proposal.

 

[VURG]

Thanks for the feedback. I think it sounds like a lot of hard work and I wouldn't really rush to try anything myself. Putting my domains with Sedo, Namedrive, etc... gives me 100% profit and 0% loss and so I'm not in a rush to change. They work hard for the commission they receive and I have a lot of respect for what they do.

I have some domain names relevant to the local area where I live that don't convert well because there is a limited number of local businesses using PPC. Maybe in the future I will approach local businesses to push up the profitability of the domains but I have better uses of my time for now.

 

[Keynes]

Phillip,

Shifting some of your prime, targeted domains to developed sites, with the aim of selling directly advertising is a good approach to try.