Domain Parking Accounts

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What is domain parking?

Domain Parking allows owners of domain names, or website addresses, to display customized pages for their names. When visitors arrive at these sites, they are shown targeted advertising related to the domain name and keywords. Users can click through to those advertiser sites, and the domain name owner can earn money.

Domain parking lets you earn money on unused domains. If your dormant or “under construction” domain doesn’t contain paid content you are losing money. The domain parking services described here provide free hosting and pay you every time someone clicks on a link. Who should you park your domains with? These services differ in important ways, and one may work better than another for you. Whether you are a domain professional or someone holding a single valuable name, parking with one of these domain parking services will turn your traffic into income. ParkQuick will help you develop the strategies you need for optimal domain parking.

You type in what you think is the domain name of a particular site, but instead you find yourself at a generic-looking page with many links relevant to the site you were looking for. This is a “parked” domain. Perhaps you mistyped the site address, or you appended the wrong top-level domain.

Domain parking can be extremely lucrative, if you register domains with a view to sell them on at a later date but aren’t sure what to do with them in the meantime, parking them can be a good idea. There are many sites that offer a domain parking service which generates the page with the pay-per-click links on it that redirect the traffic from the parked domain to relevant sites and pay you per click.

Another method is to set up your own parked page, and put pay-per-click ads up on it (this method can be time consuming if applied to multiple domains).

The main attraction of domain parking is the ease with which it can be conducted with the domain parking companies automating much of the process.Another form of domain parking is registering a domain that you know people are likely to type instead of your actual domain name, and having it redirect to your site. This method can direct relevant organic traffic towards your site.

Parked domains are domains that do not have a hosting account associated to them, and that are usually enabled with URL forwarding capabilities or through changing the default name servers, so that they point to an existing website. For example, let’s assume that you already run a forum that is hosted in a subdirectory of your Domain Name, as follows: http://www.example.com/forum/index.html. You may at one point want to register a separate domain name for your newsletter, so that it is more memorable, but may not want to move its pages to a new server, open a new hosting account, or pay to establish an add-on domain. The best option therefore is to register and park a new domain for your newsletter (for example: http://www.forum.com), which will be forwarded to http://www.example.com/froum/index.html. Your new domain can be registered with any company (preferably one that offers free URL forwarding). From a web users perspective the typed in domain: http://www.forum.com, will not remain in the browser address bar, but will change to http://www.domain.com/forum/index.html as soon as the page is displayed.

Parked domains can also be useful to webmasters whose site is hosted by a free hosting service, this allows the long and difficult to remember web address given with the free hosting account to be substituted with a domain name relevant to the website.

URL forwarding of parked domains can also be used effectively by forwarding traffic to affiliate programs and earning a commission.

- Seemingly, over 90% of the high earning parked domains (those earning above $1k per month) are typos of another site or of a TM holder’s site.

- The volume of tail end parked domains (those that earn less than a few dollars per month) equate to over 95% of the total number of “parked” domains.

- Cumulatively the tail end domains have an overall average quality score thats the lowest in the Google syndication network and yet earn less than 15% of the total Google AFD income.

- 10% of the domains parked at Sedo earn 90% of their parking revenue

Google Parking Changes Approaching

July 18, 2008 by Julia

I promised you guys some news last week which sounded important at the time, well here it is.

From a reliable source Im told that Google has had enough of domain parking, though not all elements of it it seems. [the recent class action filing by Boston attorney Hal Levitte not being relevant at this point]. Google apparently have gotten fed up of policing their AFD program and are about to become proactive with a new domain parking algorithm.

This new algo will assess all domains calling their parking feed and immediately give domains either a “pass” or a “fail” score. Meaning that if Google decide your domain has little chance of type-in traffic or if it scores low on conversions, it wont serve you a parking feed. Simple as that. The details on what percentage of parked domains this will negatively affect is sketchy at best, but you can bet your bottom dollar the numbers will be significant.

Obviously the pass/fail measuring stick is an interesting development in the domaining industry; it shows that the balance of measuring income vs value for money for advertisers has shifted, it also reveals that Google has all the knowledge it now needs about every domain name to make this call and it will overnight either devalue your domain or allow domain owners to add an extra zero to the value. It also means that Google isnt policing domain parking at the domainer level anymore (for heaven knows it must be a nightmare chasing all those Chinese folk pretending to be Americans), instead managing domain parking at the domain level.

Now ive had a chance to think about this, overall I think its positive news. For domains given the green light it can only mean higher payouts and a better relationship with advertisers. For recently registered domain names and / or new extensions and / or scammers ruining it for the rest of us, it’s adios.

**post** somewhat indirectly, i notice there’s a discussion going on over at domainstate on the subject.

If you have at least 50 - 100 domains:

Park most of your domains at Parked for some of the best payouts. Apply for accounts at SedoPro (contact us for an invitation) and SmartName / Active Audience if you expect your domains to make over $50 a week. Both services have great looking landing pages. Sedo & SedoPro are highly recommended for international domains. (Contact us to get an endorsement code for SedoPro - include your first and last name.) Domain Sponsor is another recommended choice for small and large portfolios.

Consider SmartName for creating full e-commerce sites quickly. Check out other pages of this site for more on the strengths and weaknesses of these services.

If you have less than 50 domains:

Park your domains at Sedo and/or Parked for almost instant results. Apply for a Gold Key account and try some domains there too. Some domains do dramatically better at Gold Key. As mentioned above. Sedo is best for International traffic. Sedo and NameDrive use Google/AdWords ads, while Gold Key uses Yahoo/Overture. Gold Key can provide search engine traffic, and their parking pages look better. Their site takes a while to learn.

Domain Sponsor is another recommended choice for small and large portfolios.

Vote for this chart at parkingaccounts
This table compares the currently-recommended domain parking services to help you get a better feel for how they stack up against each other. To learn about for other services that we track, use the left-hand menu. The chart below will be updated as we update our domain parking recommendations. Parking companies are listed alphabetically. Look for the features that are most desirable for you.

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