Author Topic: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking  (Read 4665 times)

dios.del.sol

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Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« on: December 17, 2014, 11:26:24 AM »
I have a couple domains purchased for a business that's doing well but in no immediate need for a website. I'm wondering if it makes sense to pursue monetized domain parking. I figure I might recover some of the domain name registration fees. I imagine traffic is low, but I haven't checked. Does anyone have experience with parking domains? Advice? Suggestions? Pitfalls? Is it worth it?

gimp

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2014, 12:08:08 PM »
Domains cost $15 a year. With due respect, if my business lived or died on $15 a year, I would probably close shop.

I have a few domains I don't use much... yet. So? It's not a big expense, but it's good to have them for when I do work with them.

dios.del.sol

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #2 on: December 17, 2014, 01:21:26 PM »
Domains cost $15 a year. With due respect, if my business lived or died on $15 a year, I would probably close shop.
Yay! "Due Respect"! Wild thing, you make my heart sing. Let's try again, shall we?

I'm not asking for business advice. Let's focus on the question, which seems like a perfectly reasonable question for this forum. I'll reword:

For no reason whatsoever, you know, just for the sake of curiosity, I'd like to know about monetized domain parking. Has anybody done it? Is it worth the bother? What scale of monthly income are we talking about? $0.10, $1, $10, $100, $1000? I have no idea if this totally worthless or a surprisingly lucrative way to make money without doing anything at all. My suspicion is that it's practically worthless, but I'd be happy to learn otherwise.

BarkyardBQ

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2014, 01:33:49 PM »
You are buying X number of domains at $10-15 per year, hoping on a possible $250-1000 profit if you sell 1.

This is called gambling.

Gamble:
1 play games of chance for money; bet: she was fond of gambling on cards and horses.
• [ with obj. ] bet (a sum of money) on a game of chance: he was gambling every penny he had on the spin of a wheel.
2 take risky action in the hope of a desired result.

Unless you have access to a time machine, you are not likely to make any money in this. I have been registering domains, and developing and hosting websites for customers for 15 years. In my experience no one has ever bought a parked domain, they simple change the name or buy an alternative TLD. Smart business people who are not venture funded simply refuse to pay that expense.
« Last Edit: December 17, 2014, 01:38:06 PM by zdravé »

Clever Name

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2014, 01:35:38 PM »
I definitely wouldn't recommend speculating on domain names, but since you said you already own a few, there are some free online tools that can supposedly estimate their value (e.g. https://www.freevaluator.com/). I have no idea how accurate they are.

Professor Ecks

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #5 on: December 17, 2014, 02:28:00 PM »
Quote
You are buying X number of domains at $10-15 per year, hoping on a possible $250-1000 profit if you sell 1.

This is called gambling.

I'm not sure if you misread the OP's initial question and follow-up clarification, or if you are just intentionally answering a question he didn't ask.


The OP is not talking about speculating on domains. He ALREADY owns a couple domains and wants some advice on the pros/cons of monetized domain parking. In other words, allowing companies, organizations or individuals to advertise on your parked domain.

Quote
Domain Parking – The domain name contains many targeted advertisements based on specific keywords. Profit can be earned by publishing advertisements on the parked domain name.

Sorry OP, I have no experience with domain parking, but I too am interested in feedback on its viability, so I'm hoping to steer future remarks towards answering the question you actually asked...

CowboyAndIndian

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #6 on: December 17, 2014, 04:13:34 PM »
I have a couple domains purchased for a business that's doing well but in no immediate need for a website. I'm wondering if it makes sense to pursue monetized domain parking.

It is a bad idea.

Only way to make money is to have a lot of traffic to that site. You hope that some percentage of that traffic will click on the ad or you get money based on RPM from advertising company.

If you park a domain, i.e. ads without any major content, you are going to have no traffic, hence no income.

Google rates sites based on their content and is very smart about finding copied/spun content.

BarkyardBQ

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #7 on: December 17, 2014, 04:46:44 PM »

I'm not sure if you misread the OP's initial question and follow-up clarification, or if you are just intentionally answering a question he didn't ask.


Apparently I did. It still has significant risk. That is minimized if he limits himself to what he already has. Since advertising can be dropped onto the site pretty easily I seems worth a try. CowboyAndIndian, raises a good point as well. You also have to determine how much time you are willing to spend trying to set it up.

Clever Name

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #8 on: December 17, 2014, 05:02:31 PM »
I definitely wouldn't recommend speculating on domain names, but since you said you already own a few, there are some free online tools that can supposedly estimate their value (e.g. https://www.freevaluator.com/). I have no idea how accurate they are.

It appears I also misread your question. Still, you are probably better off trying to sell the domains to people who actually want to make websites related to the topics in the names of said domains.

dios.del.sol

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #9 on: December 17, 2014, 08:10:33 PM »
Let me try one more time. Thanks Professor Ecks for trying to steer this back. You understood my intention correctly. To clarify:
  • We own domain names that we intend to use for the business - just not yet. I have no interest in getting rid of them. They will be useful in the future. I have no interest in buying or selling domain names.
  • I am not interested in having this be a revenue generator. All I am interested in is whether there could be a very modest ad revenue to pay for the yearly registrar fees until we decide to use the domain names.
  • I am interested in something like this. This is just something that came up in a quick search, not necessarily what I would be considering.
The particular service referenced above would charge $4 to $5/mo as a service fee and give 60% of the generated ad revenue. The domain names have no particular reason to generate high traffic. I have no idea if I would even break even. CowboyAndIndian suggests making this a DIY job (not really parking the domain any more). Thanks for the interesting suggestion. That would avoid the service fee... and I would learn something. Unfortunately, until I find more free time, it doesn't seem like my favorite way to spend my spare time... Then again, I could make a placeholder website for the business... make some relevant content and then insert ads... hmmm...

gimp

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #10 on: December 17, 2014, 09:07:18 PM »
To answer your question with no statistics, I would estimate about 10 cents. A year.

Unless you have a method of driving traffic to your site, which is hard to imagine given that it has nothing on it but temporary ads, you won't get much. You might, for example, get 1 cent per 1000 impressions.

Not only that, but having an ad-hosting site will tarnish the search engine ranking - every search engine that crawls your site will see nothing but ads and assume it's not just empty but abandoned and parked. This sort of thing gets penalized.

BarkyardBQ

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Re: Questions on Monetized Domain Parking
« Reply #11 on: December 18, 2014, 09:15:07 AM »
Not only that, but having an ad-hosting site will tarnish the search engine ranking - every search engine that crawls your site will see nothing but ads and assume it's not just empty but abandoned and parked. This sort of thing gets penalized.

This.