JuliannaIt seems that more and more people are in the position of having domain names they are not actively using, but do not necessarily want to sell. Usually these domains were registered for a business idea that wasn’t actualized, or simply because a great, potentially lucrative domain was available and/or not renewed by its original registrant. For most people, domain names not being used for a business or personal project are ‘parked’ – meaning visitors typically see an “under construction” page, “for sale” message, or page displaying contact information an/or advertising by the domain registrar.
There are a few ways you can go about monetizing your idle domain names. First off, you’re going to want to look into setting up an account with a company that specializes in domain monetization – www.domainsponsor.com and www.domainspa.com are two of the better-known, but you can find others by simply ‘googling’ the term. Usually the only caveat is that you must have a certain number of domain names in your portfolio before using the service. This number varies between companies. Back to Google for a moment. They too have a domain monetization program called Google Adsense for Domains (also known as Google DomainPark) which delivers targeted advertisements relevant to your domain name to parked pages. However, Adsense for Domains’ high traffic requirements exclude all but the most serious ‘Domainers’ (aka Domain Speculators) – your network of sites will need to generate approximately 750,000 page views per month to be eligible for the program.
Programs such as these have made domain monetization a lucrative industry in recent years. According to the Wall Street Journal, experts who track the online ad industry estimate that revenue from parked domain pages (aka directory pages) will reach $1 billion by 2007. So how does it all work? Domain monetization companies leverage optimization technology – similar to Google AdSense – to create relevant landing pages for each of your domain names. For example, if you type in a name like www.singlemalt.com, you will find a series of links related to whiskey, liquor sales, bar paraphernalia, etc., and each time a visitor clicks on a link you get paid.
Because domain monetization relies on direct navigation – meaning a visitor must type a specific domain name into their browser – domain names previously associated with popular websites and those that are similar to, or common misspellings of, well known names, products or brands tend to fair the best. Companies can pay up to 50% of all revenues generated from your parked page and most have minimum payout amounts of around $50 – meaning, until you reach that amount no cheque will be cut. If your registrar is Webnames.ca, the whole process is pretty easy to set-up with our ‘Forwarding’ or ‘Gripping’ services. Once you set up an account with a domain monetization company, they’ll give you a url which you then forward to all your domain names. It takes a couple days to one week for a domain or domain portfolio to ‘optimize’ – i.e. get the best, relevant keywords/links onto your parked page. Domains with lower traffic tend to take a little longer.
Of course, capitalizing on residual traffic from previously successful websites with good search engine rankings, old bookmarks and typo traffic (typossquatting) is not without controversy, especially the practice of “Domain Tasting”. ‘Domain Tasting’ is when Domainers sign up for hundreds of domains, set up parked pages and run ads on them, then delete ones that aren’t profitable before the 4 to 5 refund grace period expires. While many people in the domain industry have called for this loophole to be closed, arguing it negatively impacts the industry by limiting the availability of good domain names for businesses, others argue speculation of this type is simply a no-brainer in a free market system. For a good discussion of both sides, check out Joi Ito’s blog post and related comments on Circle ID.
More Information:
ICANN Wiki entry on Parked Domain Monetization
Joi Ito blog entry and related comments on the Parked Domain Monetization business
Good tutorial on Parked Domain Monetization