IMO, even the free sign up is better than basic parking.
That being said, the $10/month plan has some excellent features. The feature I find most valuable is the ability to customize your template. This feature enables me to do two things:
1. Add affiliate banners/links/widgets to the template. I do this extensively. See
this post for more details.
2. Create a navigation system for a bunch of subdomains so I can target more longtail search keywords. Without the ability to customize your template so you can interlink subdomains, the ability to create subdomains isn't very helpful. See
this page for more detail or look at
this site for an example of what can be done with domain apps and template customization.
My opinion is that unless your domains are really poor quality (like most of mine! :D )you shouldn't have too much trouble making back your costs. Of course, fleshing out your site will take much longer than simply pointing them to a parked page, but you get what you put in. For example, I just bought that San Antonio domain in December, and I'm still not 100% finished with customizing it (I still need to go through and add affiliate links that are more appropriate to the subdomains niche). Setting up those 72 sites took about 30 hours, and I estimate it will take another 3 hours to finih replacing the generic affiliate banners with more targeted ones.
I have about 60 tlds hosted at WhyPark, and I've created about 500 subdomains. I only have one site with subdomains that I can provide any hard data for though. It has 24 subdomains, and is both locally targeted and in a small niche (weddings) so it gets very low traffic. Since adding the subdomains (and after having
built some links to it), I have seen the following results from the WhyPark adfeed alone (does not include affiliate income, and as always, your results may vary):
1/20/2010-2/18/2010
Visitors Page Views Searches Clicks RPC CTR Revenue
410 801 146 4 $0.06 0.98% $0.22
1/20/2011-2/18/2011
Visitors Page Views Searches Clicks RPC CTR Revenue
1,827 4,052 121 39 $0.12 2.13% $4.71
Of that $4.71, $0.52 is from subdomains. Obviously, this domain is not a huge money maker, but it is consistently pulling in 6 times its registration costs from the WhyPark adfeed alone. Even having just 3 crappy domains like this makes me break even. But again, your results may vary, and this is only an indication of my results.
