Companies
Domain Parking Leading Companies..
SmartName is the premium service from Name Media - the parent company of GoldKey and ActiveAudience. They purchased this service that was originally developed by Ari Goldberger and Larry Fischer who founded the service. NameMedia quickly moved the parked domains to their new system that offers over 500 themes (including all of the themes available at GoldKey and ActiveAudience and more). Some long-time customers balked at the changes. After some time NameMedia brought back the older platform as “SmartName Classic” for those original domain owners (many of whom had created custom templates for their domains). New applicants are added to the new platform.
SmartName includes some features not found in other domain parking services. One of these is a shopping template that quickly creates destination shopping sites for your domains. This service uses Shopping.com to create stores that sell products. According to NameMedia, you are paid based on PPC (when someone clicks), but you can promote these full-fledged e-commerce sites in ways that you cannot promote a parked domain.
Storefronts are customizable, and you can add content to all SmartName templates help sites gain and possibly retain SEO rank. A sample storefront without any customization can be seen at TechnologyLiquidators.com, while a more highly developed site can be seen at BabyBag.net.
TrafficZ is one of the first domain parking services. I keep many of my lower-traffic domains there because they have really great stats. They also allow you to include whatever simple html content you want on your landing pages, such as links to your other sites (but no javascript or similar code). You can change keywords for your site on the fly and see the results immediately. TrafficZ would like you to have at least 50 domains, but exceptions are made - So ask. I have received great customer service from TrafficZ at times, but sometimes they do not reply to emails.
The new website 2.0 landing pages look more like real sites than most landing pages. With their 5.0 service the site has a new look You do not have to choose between pay-per-click and pay-per-impression. Their MaxPay program will pay you both ways. This makes them especially good for domains that get a lot of pageviews but few clicks.
You can create a custom banner for your site. This allows better “branding” with the same look and feel throughout your domains. Customer service is excellent. TrafficZ allows you to make changes in real time to the keywords on your sites, no waiting for someone else to approve the changes. Adult sites recently got sexy thumbnail images desigined to increase click-through.
An example of a trafficz domain is webmortgage.net
ActiveAudience is a second generation domain parking service from the creators of Gold Key. This newer service appears to target owners of larger portfolios and domain professionals with higher-traffic domains. Gold Key and BuyDomains merged some time back to become Name Media. ActiveAudience is built upon the experience of professionals who were involved in both projects.
Their features include:
- The ability to place your own custom logo on the top of your sites
- The ability to upload your own main photo image for custom pages
- Improved ability to test keywords in rotation for auto-optimization
ActiveAudience offers the option of rotating parking pages which auto-optimize your revenue (similar in this respect to Domain Sponsor). The standard landing pages are very professional, with targeted graphics and links. One-click landers appear when Yahoo/Overture determines that your domain deserves them. These pages are more stark, so that extra elements don’t detract from someone clicking on links.
Don’t bother with domains that violate someone’s trademark. They are pretty strict about not accepting these domains.
The graphics are crisper than the older Gold Key-style graphics and many of the pages look more professional. The older style pages actually rotate along with these newer pages and more generic (but still attractive) text pages. You have complete control over color schemes and graphic layouts (and whether layouts rotate to maximize cash). We currently recommend this service for people who own more than 50-100 domains. Others can receive most of the benefits by signing-up with Gold Key, which is now essentially a clone of this service.
Occasionally Active Audience will change a setting without notifying everyone and my domains will end-up blank. Someone also over-rode my keywords and replaced “grandparent” keywords with “mesothelioma” keywords. Overall it is a great service, but keep an eye on your domains for changes you didn’t authorize.
Domain Sponsor has been highly praised by most domain professionals. Their system “automatically optimizes” your domains. Domain Sponsor sends out checks quickly and reliably. PayPal payments are now available too.
Domain Sponsor was one of the first PPC parking services that moved to a hybrid pay-per-click / pay-for-performance model. They no longer pay the same amount per click on a keyword - rather they attempt to analyze the “quality” of your traffic. This appears to mean that they want to know if visitors really buy stuff from the sites that they click through to. As of 2008 almost everyone does this. 
Domain Sponsor allows you to create a site with custom graphics. You can also set whether the domain rotates between different landing pages or gives peope the same page every time.
Domain Sponsor’s “auto optimization” process starts with semantically constructed generic search page that keeps track of what people search for and click on. These links eventually migrate to the main page. The process works quickest for high-traffic domains. You also have the ability to add or remove keywords. The have upgraded their processes several times. It is now possible to get graphic-rich pages that will rotate with the more generic pages for the system to see which pages earn more revenue.
The stats that I get from Domain Sponsor always show fewer visitors than other services show for the same domain. Payouts are competitive, however. Digital-Daycare.com is an example of a Domain Sponsor domain.
Gold Key is a domain parking service that primarly uses PPC links from Yahoo (after flirting with Google for a time). Gold Key allows a choice of landing pages,including graphic templates that make the landing pages look more like real websites. Their sister site Active Audience is open only to larger domain holders. Both sites now allow:
- The ability to place your own custom logo on the top of your sites
- The ability to upload your own main photo image for custom pages
- Improved ability to test keywords in rotation for auto-optimization
The ability to customize sites with up to 21 of your own hand-selected keywords.
Pure type-in keyword domains and domains with search engine traffic seem to work best here. In some cases you can more than double your income on these high quality domains. Some people make a lot of money here. There are special tools available for high-traffic domain owners. (Mediocre names may do better elsewhere, and names with trademark issues may be rejected.)
Stats are very detailed. Gold Key and Active Audience domains seem to do better with search engines than domains parked with other services. This is especially true if you park your domains by using their nameservers (rather than by redirecting the URL). In both cases the developers worked to make the domains look like real websites to search engine robots.
An example of a traditional style Gold Key domain is recoveryhealth.com. Newer domains look just like Active Audience domains
Fabulous is a parking service with some fabulous features. They are also a domain registrar, and they have tools to help you manage your entire domain portfolio - even those domains registered elsewhere. Their parking tools are some of the most flexible in the industry, allowing you to park using Roar.com’s pay-per-click service or Dark Blue’s affiliate program. You can create custom sites with their “Dynamic Generator,” which allows you to create custom landing pages for every domain in your portfolio by combining Layout, Color and Relevant Images. Another handy tool is their Auto Optimization engine which picks the best converting configuration (Layout + Color) based on CTR.
Fabulous requires that you own at least 50 domains. Their portfolio tools are excellent and highly recommended. Their parking and site creation tools are not quite as user-friendly. Their Fabulous 5.0 service is designed for domain professionals. It is reported to work well with high quality keyword domains. Based in Australia, Fabulous also does better than most for gambling-related domains.
Fabulous is also a registry with good prices on domain names; and they sell premuim domains on the secondary market.
An example of a Fabulous domain is Classof98.com (but their domains can look much better than this one).
