Why Domain Parking works for me….

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.

 

Just one question:
are these earnings from typo traffic?

Thanks

 

Nope. I don't have any typo domains.

 

Woaw....amazing...
may i know how many domains you have/you parking?
and where do you parking your domains? (sedo/afternic or...?
thank you

 

@privatereg Congratualtions on your success
great information,
you have been there from the start 2000, it's like the previous century on the internet

i used to provide traffic and domains acquisition to businesses,
so i'm familiar with how to track the good domains who have good backlinks
there are tools/services that you probably use that simplify all the process

in 2018, i parked a portfolio of 600 domains for a test,
5 domains generated 99% of the parking revenues,
and one domain was steady 20-40$/month
no surprise i sold most of these domains who were generating parking revenues,
just by having them listed on marketplaces

so from my experiment, i can see that someone with your skillset,
can build a portfolio of domains that only generate parking revenue

as you mention, the auctions prices are just insane right now,
and that make the game really hard
and good luck finding these domains at closeout, they are snipped really fast

all the best
Hal

 

Congratulations for such splendid performance!

I am doing this experiment for last 6 months with limited domains and budget and witness some encouraging positive trend so I agree with your view about parking business:



Though some of your data really amazed me and also month on month consistency only prove that you know very well how this parking business run. So congratulation once again!

Appreciate if you could response few queries:
1. Parking portfolio size (number of domains)
2. Tentative investment
3. Any specific reason for such high and consistent CTR

Thank and regards,

 

1. I'd rather not say number of domains (its in the low thousands) - I don't think it matters how many domains - the key is does the domain have an ability to break even in 12-24 months - even if you have one.
2. I've tried multiple parking companies in the past. There are slight variations but as long as I can force related terms, they all balance out about the same since they all have the same source feed. At that point, it depends on what rev share you have with the the parking vendor since the pay rate from G will be similar for all G companies

 

Thank you for the detailed and informative post, @privatereg. While I have not really studied parking in any detail, your observation that parking is not dead but you need to now be much more sophisticated than was the case a decade or more ago. Lot's of gold in your post, I particularly like detail given in this:

Best wishes for continued success in parking, and thanks for all that you have shared.

Bob

 

Congrats on your progress so far! As I said in a previous post, its in the low thousands and doesn't matter how many you have as far as stability. Same thing with Tentative investment. I think high CTR is definitely related to ability to request related search terms but that takes research on kind of traffic and visitors were coming to the site previously - looking at archive, back links, pop-up links, etc.

 

congrats on great rev and info and knowledge...and being in today's maybe what... 1% of top rev makers....its doable I agree...but like 1% richest people on earth it's a bit tricky to get there..

I'd say write a book and make money..but we all.know all no fakes who really make money dont need to sell books to.make money hehe

 

HAHA. You're right. yeah - not interested in sharing info. Domain Parking is a strange business - the ones making money don't want to share because of increased competition; however, judging by the auction prices, I think the word is out for some folks.

 

Forgive my lack of knowledge. But do those figures say that's per month profit or is it accumulative over the months as one amount building ?

 

ps just speculate for me..with zero optimizing and letting bodis it. how much less u think u would make..in fact it shouldn't be speculating cause u know what u did b4 optimizing and after.

also...why bodis...have u tried all others? I thought they had special places for high rev parkers

 

Yeah, there is a significant difference with no optimization. With no optimization, when you pull up your domain name, there might be one or two related terms that look OK, but several other terms are completely unrelated. My guess is a visitor will quickly know the site is garbage and clicks out. If you can force terms (in Bodis - they show 7 for desktop, 5 for mobile), AND G allows it (because its completely related to past traffic), then in most cases, they will see your related terms and the CTR% goes up. It's hard to tell you % difference, but it's definitely a difference. My fear is one day G may disallow all forced related terms, but hopefully that will be years away. I think they changed last year to take your related terms as a suggestion instead of literal is due to bad actors in the space.

As I said in a previous thread, I've tried them all. Since G controls all ad display now (no more javascript and allowing you to intercept the display and insert affiliate links), they all output the same. As far as special deals, I don't know of any other than if your smart price score is high and your chargebacks are $0 or less than 1%, G rewards you with higher RPC - just a guess. Finally, as far as special deals, yes, higher volume quality traffic owners will get higher rev share - it's not automatic - its based on your relationship with your domain parking account exec.

 

I always had this curiosity... how much u think parking companies take of our cuts... putting aside its adjusted a.bit based on high revenues makers.. I mean doesnt something like park rev company seem perfect biz where u basically always meet yer financial goal each month...cause if u fall short u just adjust downward rev others...and guess what in this biz they will have zero clue bout it... what's yer take on that...

 

I really don't like to guess; however, when ParkingCrew sold their business, it was announced publicly at the time it was sold that their rev share was 75%/25%. Here's a quote from it (I don't have the link) "
It also discloses some of the economics of the ParkingCrew business. The service monetizes 22 million domains owned by 35,000 people. It pays 75% of its earnings to the investor and keeps the other 25%. This nets out to $10.09 on average per domain per year to the investor and $3.36 to CentralNic."
I don't know if the new owner kept that or not. This is strictly a guess, but I don't think reputable parking companies dynamically change the rev share behind the scenes to make their rev goals - if they did, I would see marked differences in rev. I have stats going back several years, and my EPC and CTR are fairly consistent. I just don't buy mesothelioma type sites or crazy high potential EPC sites. I stick with middle of the road...

 

Here's a really cool quote from the same article I read about how big this domain name industry is:
"Management estimates the domain name market to be worth c US$5bn annually, with a further US$25bn pa market for domain-related internet services. There are c 367m domain names registered, with c 100m held by domain name investors for resale but the vast majority, c 267m, are owned by individuals or companies for their own use. CentralNic currently has c 13% penetration of the internet services offerings market (the group supplies at least one service to 40m of 367m domains), which is highly fragmented and ripe for consolidation."

 

I have good experience in SEO, Adsense, adword and Google analytics, seeing your revenue picture, i felt one thing very out of place CTR . A CTR (click through rate) of 41.25% is really unbelievable and if it true, which ever ad company you use could have banned you on 1st month itself. sorry i feel its Photoshop one.

 

It might be but, as someone that doesn't know the guy personally, I can assure you that anything he says shows that he knows what he's doing.

Just my advice,
Photoshop or not, try to get as much as you get from the info that is provided in this thread.

 

Yup, that's exactly the reason why guys like me don't post because of guys like you. I have zero incentive to fudge stats. I don't know how to use an image editor nor do I know anyone who does. Even showing you a 1099 would cause you think that was photoshopped as well. I'm not going to go on and on trying to convince you so I'll consider you a doubter not a hater. Since you are an SEO expert, let me try to offer one explanation for the CTR....

I did a test on a few hundred of my names - random selection against a page with google analytics to see how many actual visitors come to these domains due to raw URLS. There are 5 times as many visitors as the parking company shows as number of visitors. So if the parking company reported all visitors to come to the site my CTR would be 20% of what is reported. Not sure how much experience you have with parking companies, but each has different filtering rules which is why sometimes one parking company shows a lot more visitors than others. Some are more strict on disallowing them to come to the park page and they constantly filter out bots, bad traffic, etc., and report the actual visitors that will see the park page.

That may not satisfy you, but nothing else I can offer as explanation....

 

hello
really congrats. it's always a pleasure to read your posts.

I've a couple of questions too if you can answer.....
1)where are you living? if you can't say the country i'd like to know the continent
2) now that you are back to spend time in the parking biz, in order to keep things profitable are you still spending 90h per week?
3)in your opinion is still possible nowadays to stay profitable, spending around 50 hours/week?


For the other guys that are still reading till here.... if you want to sell your traffic & revenue names, you can PM me.
Like the thread starter, in 99% of the cases, I'm not interested to purchase names at 30x for the reasons mentioned above.

 

Hey Pablo! Heres my responses:
1. I live in USA and pretty much focus on US/Canada traffic as well. I speak Spanish as well so that could help me branch out to those gTLDs; just haven't had time.
2. I spend about 4-5 hours a day mostly because I have a lot of programs and apps that do a lot of the work for me. Some I designed myself but it's not for public distribution.
3. I don't think the number of hours is as important so there's no magic number. Since I have a lot of domains to optimize and manage, that takes about half my time. Research through automation doesn't take as long as the old days because of the automation.

Let me finish this by saying that I am in a growth mode which takes more of my time than it would if I reached my net profit goals and just needed to maintain the traffic levels (spend less time buying domains and only replace the dying ones).

Best of luck!

 

Hey guys!

It looks like I haven’t gotten any haters on this thread so far (except for the SEO guy who’s not really a hater – I didn’t want to really blow his mind by saying that actually a number of my domains have a CTR% much higher than 100% - He’d really think I was a scammer HAHA). Short answer – parking companies allow a visitor to click on more than one link so 1 visitor, 2 clicks on 2 different advertisers, 200% CTR. So parking stats is much different than traditional G analytics type stats.

I thought about this and decided I would share something that might dispel the notion on why some people think domain parking doesn’t work, or at least they think it works for the elite 1% with deep pockets but not for the little guy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you ever attended domain conferences on domain monetization, you always hear the CEOs end up saying the same thing. They want “quality traffic”. First of all, you might think what exactly does that mean, and secondly why should they care – don’t they just make a percentage of any traffic your domain sends and shouldn’t they want as much traffic as they can get (maybe I’ll write another post on that one – there’s a lot to that – looks like I’m writing a free E-Book HAHA).

But let me share why traffic quality matters and how it ties into your possible bad experience in domain parking. I’m going to use GD Auctions as an example, because I think a lot of beginners start with this site to try out parking. See if this happened to you….Since GD is one of the few auction sites that publishes traffic numbers, you figure you’ll just buy one of those domains that shows 300 visitors or maybe go for broke and go after something that shows over 1,000 visitors. And hey, traffic numbers even exist in GD Closeouts! Jackpot! So let’s say you battle in the auction, you outbid everyone else with something that has 300 visitors a month, you park it, and you wait for those 300 visitors…and you wait…and you wait…and 1 visitor shows up (maybe it was you HAHA). And others on the forum suggest that you should wait a few days for the nameservers to propagate worldwide and then it will pick-up. But it never does. Your first thought is you just got scammed. Either GD pumped up the traffic numbers just for the auction, or the parking company is stealing your traffic. Am I right?

So I’ll share with you that GD did not pump up the numbers for auction purposes (I spoke with the GD Director of Marketing at a domain conference once to get more information about this), and the parking company didn’t steal your traffic, which caused you to think maybe Parking is dead or it’s a scam. I posted previously that parking companies heavily filter out bad traffic – not just bots but bad IP addresses, and a host of other criteria. You may not know this, but your domain name is still getting 300 visitors a month, just like GD posted. The problem is you never did the research to see if most of those visitors were real visitors (that’s where all the hard work comes in and why this is a sophisticated business) and they are getting filtered out so they never show up on your stats. GD=Raw Traffic, Parking Stats=Filtered Traffic. Why is the parking company filtering out the traffic other than the obvious reason that those don’t convert? Why not just take it all and redirect the bad ones to zero click advertising? Because they’re obligated to with their G and affiliate contracts. Its obvious that Advertisers only want quality traffic that converts, and if you open the floodgates and send everything to G for example to serve ads, the parking company itself loses rev share with G, gets on probation, or worse yet, gets banned (look what happened to RM a few years back). So it’s not the parking company filtering out bad traffic because it’s a nice thing to do – it’s a requirement and why they say over and over in domain conferences that quality traffic is key. It’s important to you and it’s important to them.

Let’s go back and talk about GD auctions again. You see a domain that shows 12 visitors and you immediately skip over it and go after the 300 visitor one. But the real question is would you rather have a domain with 12 visitors that filters to 5 quality visitors or one with 300 that filters down to 0? But please, don’t start going after 12 visitor domains without doing your research!

OK, so here’s another observation about GD auctions and you’ve probably asked yourself. What about the ones where GD shows zero traffic and yet there are 20 bidders fighting for it? You look at the domain, it’s not a keyword, there’s no value to the name whatsoever – maybe it’s the original owner fighting to get it back you think, or maybe you have absolutely no idea why people are going after it. Some of you may already know this, but while there certainly is some value to exploring the domains that display traffic stats, it’s the ones that show no traffic at all where many of the better domain names exist. What? That’s crazy! How can that be?

So when GD first started their auction site, it was a closed auction house where only domains that were expiring from the GD registrar (and their direct affiliates) were shown there. A few years ago, they started opening it up to other registrars to start using their platform and from what I can see they are on an aggressive strategy to bring many more onboard, either through acquisition or lease arrangements (I’m not 100% sure, but that’s what I see when I scan the domains and see the whois history grow into ever increasing outside registrars like ENOM, TUCOWs, and many more non-US registrars). OK, so that does that mean? Well, the answer is obvious – GD does not have those traffic numbers, and so no traffic appears. Secret is out! Maybe you’ve been focusing on the wrong domains all this time. I don’t have any problem sharing this because there’s so many of them that show no traffic every day.

So what does this mean? Obviously it means that there is no lazy way to riches by either looking at a traffic number on GD and buying it, or jumping in on an auction that already has 5, 10, 20 bids or more, winning the auction and realizing that you just got scammed because guess what? FOMO kicked in, you with everyone else just bidded up a completely worthless domain that had low quality or garbage traffic and now parking is dead to you.

Let me finish this post by saying that even with all the technology and APIs and intelligence that I access and internally developed to try to find those quality traffic domains I still make mistakes and have to keep improving the process. This is not an exact science – I don’t have a crystal ball – I just combine a myriad of methods to look at the probability that quality traffic probably comes to that expired domain, and if it ticks most of the boxes, its probably something I’ll go after.

Don’t think for a minute that the stats I showed you in my OP resulted in every domain killing it with loads of clicks and revenue. Far from it…I have lots of domains that don’t make any money at all – at least on a given day. Some make money because of a single visitor in one month, but it’s enough to still hit the 12-24 month break even target. But some are still a partial or total loss and I let them go – You can do all the research in the world and still get fooled – it happens to all of us – the key is to have more winners than losers – just like the stock market or most other investments.

Hope this helps…

 

Where you parked?

 

Hi @privatereg

Being an Adsense user from the very start with developed infosec sites, and later just parking my domains at parking companies, I love to read your detailed postings about the current state of 'advanced' parking.

I'm not parking anymore in 2021, but I'm not a hater either. I'm just doing other things. I recognize your dedication, and I'm sure you'd succeed in any other field with this pragmatic view. You're doing your research, and keep fine-tuning w/ data you gather during the process. It's not for all, but it's certainly inspirational for all members on this forum. (Some of them being successful parkers as well).

Thanks for sharing.