News from the Parking Services

Parked.com had a system outage that affected their backend and stats from September 7-10. They issued a detailed statement attributing the outage to "a problem with one of primary backend servers that processes and stores all of our finalized stats. At that time we decided to bring the server down to try and fix the problem." Things apparently got worse, and the outage continued for longer than they expected. Users got a generous bonus as compensation, and none of the actual parked domains were ever affected. TrafficZ had a similar outage 9/13 - 9/14, but theirs was planned in advance to upgrade their system. It just took a little bit longer than planned.

Active Audience and GoldKey announced a new image manager that allows "more control over uploading, editing and deleting all of your custom images (logos and custom photos)." You can add images up to 481px x481px.

 

NameDrive weathered a particularly severe denial-of-service attack in late August. The attack was severe enough to bring down their domains, even though they had most of them set to deliver a very light-weight landing page because of the attack. According to their blog "In addition to the 600K domains we have parked on our system, our servers were being hit by XX,XXX false connections per second for over 24 hours. The attack is increasing as we speak and has been since it began. We estimate that just to keep up this attack, it has cost the aggressor at least five figures and possibly six figures to initiate and sustain. This wasn't poor defenses on our part, it was the use of overwhelming force and financial resources on theirs."

 

How to Improve Your Parking Income

If your domains have been parked with a service for at least a month, you now have an opportunity to increase your income. Take some time to examine your statistics in detail. Sort the domains by "uniques" or "landings" and look for those domains that get a lot of traffic but lower income. These are the domains that you want to try at another service. If your domains are currently at a Google-based service you should move the poorly-performing domains to a Yahoo-based service. If they are at a Yahoo-based service you should move the poorly-performing domains to a Google-based service. If you've already tried this, then consider moving them to a service using the same primary feed provider that will create a different type of landing page.

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New Domain Parking Comparison Chart

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.

Recommended Domain Parking Services
Service	Auto Optimize?	Minimum Payout	Payment Method	Minimum Portfolio size	Comments
Active Audience	Yes	$50 for checks, $10 for PayPal $100 for wire	Check, PayPal, Wire transfer	Large or high traffic portfolios. (See GoldKey for small portfolios)	Nice Landing Pages, but few 1-click landers. Image editing available. Yahoo-based
GoldKey	Yes	$50 for checks, $10 for PayPal $100 for wire	Check, PayPal, Wire transfer	Small Portfolios accepted	Nice Landing Pages, but few 1-click landers. Image editing available. Yahoo-based.
Parked	Yes	$20	Paypal, Wire, Direct Deposit, Check	10	Get paid twice a month, strong anti-click fraud. Yahoo and Ask.com feeds.
Sedo	Yes	$20	Paypal, Direct Deposit	1	Easily optimize to keywords, 1-click pages. Google-based.
SedoPro	Yes	$20	Paypal, Direct Deposit	200 or $200/month income	Like Sedo, with somewhat higher payouts Send email for an invitation
TrafficZ	Yes	$25	Paypal, Check	100	Great stats, best landing pages, mostly 2-click landers. Yahoo-based

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Video Feature: Optimizing Domains with SedoPro

Sedo invited their SedoPro members to a partner forum earlier this year. Along with recreation and good food they provided helpful information about domain parking and other aspects of Sedo's business. We are now featuring two videos by Matt Bentley from a session at the SedoPro Partner Forum on the subject of Parking Optimization using SedoPro. Almost all of the information also applies to "Sedo regular."

Recommended Services - There were no changes in our recommendations this month.