There's been no summer slow-down in the domain
parking field.
NameMedia emerged as a major player, shedding
their temporary name of YesDirect. GoDaddy also entered the
field, but they charge a fee for something that is free
everywhere else. We recently initiated coverage of
Domain Spa, one of the original domain monetization services.
Domain Spa was one of the first domain monetization
services. If you tried them in the past, it's time to try
them again. The most recent version is very friendly and
flexible - and it has some great landing page templates. It
also includes some features that other services don't offer.
You can set up your domains within certain categories
when you first add them to the system. A generic lander
shows up for a few hours, but fairly quickly you will see a
custom template. DomainSpa does not monetize clicks from
certain countries - but they allow you to specify an
alternative service (or a mix of alternative services) for
the traffic that they don't monetize. You can send this
traffic to Afternic, DomainSponsor, Goldkey.com, NEW.net,
and TrafficZ. According to the company "DomainSpa is a
unique product that was developed by using Information
Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks,
Text Mining, and Statistical Analysis technologies to find
the most appropriate sponsors (advertisers) for a specific
domain name and/or query."
Domain Spa monetizes domains through a number of
different partners, including Ask.com, Enhance, ePilot, Kanoodle,
Looksmart, Miva, MyGeek, SearchFeed and Yahoo. Advertisers
can also bid directly on individual templates for highly
targeted revenue. Examples of DomainSpa domains include
MyDentalLab.com PsychotherapyOffice.com and HowHi.com. It's
too soon to predict their payouts.
Reframing themselves as a media company, NameMedia
appears poised to challenge Marchex and Sedo at the same
time. NameMedia is the parent company of GoldKey and
ActiveAudience.
NameMedia hired veteran media executive Kelly Conlin as a
first step in establishing their media company credentials. Conlin has experience in Internet, print, and television. He
was CEO of Primedia - a media company known for its
enthusiast publications and its sale of About.com to the New
York Times. Conlin
joined Primedia in October 2003 and
struggled unsuccessfully to make the company profitable,
burdened by the company's holdings of print publications. He
will have a very different challenge ahead of him at
NameMedia, where everything is in cyberspace. Before
Primedia Conlin was head of International Data Group.
NameMedia's Active Audience service continues to add features
and to perform well. Gold Key hasn't changed, but it still
brings in good money for domainers.
Sedo responded by announcing a new partnership with
Domain Capital to offer domain investors financing on
high-value domain purchases. The program will support a
large number of investors seeking to purchase high-return
domain names without making a large upfront capital
expenditure. Sedo’s financing program is designed for domain
name purchases of $10,000 or more. Through the first five
months of 2006, Sedo reports that they brokered 211 such
transactions.
Sedo CEO Tim Schumacher is quoted in a press release as
saying “Our partnership with Domain Capital enables Sedo to
bring more value to domain investors and extends our track
record of delivering innovative services to the market.”
GoDaddy entered the domain parking business in June. They
have been parking domains for years - but only when people
buy a domain and don't put up a site. In such cases GoDaddy
gets all the money. Their new "CashParking" service requires
you to pay them cash every month in order to participate.
Fees range from $3 to $40 a month depending on the size of
your portfolio and the revenue split that you want.
It looks like GoDaddy expects to lure some of its own
customers into their system - people who may not be aware
that the same (or better) services are available free
elsewhere.
ParkingDots is poised to unveil the last pieces of their
upgrade in July. The improvements are mostly on the back
end, and should speed up some of their processes. They
continue to pay an unparalleled 80% of their revenue share
for parking, 100% for leasing and they are domain buyers. A
representative of ParkingDots took issue with one item in
last month's issue. When we talked about their fantastic 80%
payouts on parking, we implied that their cut from Overture
might be lower than that of other services. ParkingDots has
a former Overture employee on their payroll who confirmed
that their revenue share is ‘highly competitive.'
Some time back Fabulous introduced their Fabulous 5.0
service. This service is similar to ActiveAudience or Sedo
Pro. We have not tried this particular service, but Fabulous
claims that the service offers "comprehensive domain
reporting, Market leading revenue, customizable graphic
landing pages, keyword and associated phrase optimization,
free domain sales tools, and $6.75 .COM domain
registrations.
TrafficZ has had a solid month with no new news. Their
flexible system still allows the creation of mini-sites that
monetize well.
Domain Sponsor's parent company, Oversee.net (or is it
Revenue.net? I'm confused) announced that they recently
purchased a domain portfolio of 35,000 domains. Andrew
Allemann of
Domain Name Wire covered this story on June
22nd, and suggested that they may be interested in buying
even more domains.
