2007 may be best remembered as the year of "traffic quality." The amount that domainers are earning per click was down between 10% and 30% according to our own figures and reports from other reliable domainers. There has been a lot of speculation as to the reasons for this. If you advertise using Google's AdWords or Yahoo's similar service you probably haven't seen a similar decrease in the cost of your ads. Many cuts in payouts have been made in the name of "traffic quality," but I doubt that this is the whole story. There were lots more PPC pages competing for ads than in previous years. Almost all registrars include PPC ads on their generic parking pages now - for people who have purchased a domain but not done anything at all with it. The growth of "domain tasting" - where people "buy" a domain, test it, and get their money back within a few days - may also be a factor. With so many sites competing for ads Google and Yahoo can afford to pay a little less.
Some services seem to be bucking the downward trend. Income from
Parked.com has held steady for many, while others have seen some increases. Over the course of 2007 our recommendations changes, with
Parked and
TrafficZ being added as a recommended service and
DomainSponsor and
Parking Dots being dropped.
Sedo/SedoPro and Active Audience/GoldKey have performed well enough to continue being recommended.
Active Audience and
GoldKey briefly switched feed providers from Yahoo to Google and domainers watched their income plummet. When they quietly switched back to Yahoo the numbers recovered somewhat. We have avoided some services, such as Bodis - which has no obvious business model (and recently seems to have imploded) and GoDaddy - which charges money for their parking services.
Some services have begun to feature templates for .mobi domains and other domains frequented by mobile phone users.
TrafficZ and
Sedo have .mobi templates. In late November
Active Audience announced that its parking pages are now "mobile-ready." They reported that "If a mobile device is already enabled for Web access,
Active Audience parked sites will render correctly. Regardless of your domain names extension, our parked pages are built to recognize that the end user is accessing the page from a mobile device." Doubtless this is also true of
GoldKey, since the two sites are now virtual twins.
Over the course of 2007 the parking services added many new templates, as well as new management tools for domainers.
TrafficZ brought out their Website2.0 and Tiles templates that resemble full-blown websites, and continued their ability for custom content. Parked also added a custom content editor, along with image editing capability. ActiveAudience/GoldKey, Fabulous, and DomainSponsor now offer similar editing services.
Customer loyalty programs became more popular in 2007.
DomainSponsor started this trend by giving away admission to its DomainFest events if you earned a certain amount of money with them.
NameDrive had a Spring bonus program to reward people who earned more with them, and Sedo joined in the act toward the end of the year by offering "presents" to Sedo customers who increased their parking income.
WhyPark began attracting domainers in 2007 with their content-driven model. is a little different. They will create sites full of content and allow you to place your own ads on the site. Their service is less trouble than fully developing your domains, but creates domains with more content than single-page parking services. Some of our test domains have gained PageRank 2 from Google with no promotion, and this has resulted in a modest increase in traffic.
Domaining and Domain Parking got more media attention in 2007, and in the process received more criticism in the press and Online than in past years. Much of this backlash came from disgruntled webmasters (or webmaster wannabes) who complained that domainers buy up all the good domains and park them so that people can't use them for real websites. The complaints also include the fact that these domains are often for sale on a secondary market that values them more highly than the usual $10 registration fee.
“Domainers”?? I'm sorry, but let's call a spade a spade.If you're in the business of registering a domain name (trademarked or not) in the hopes that, one day, someone will offer you big money for it, you're a squatter. Plain and simple. Registering a typo domain isn’t “domaining” either, it’s “Typo-squatting”, which is almost as deplorable as “Necro-squatting” an abandoned domain or sniping one that someone forgot to renew in time, which has happened to far too many friends of mine. If you don’t have a bona-fide need for a specific domain name (E.G. You’re going to actually use it as opposed to park it), you shouldn’t be touching it. I scoff against people who attempt to paint an image of legitimacy to this deplorable practice, and I must to draw into question just whose trying to pull an Orwellian word redefinition here.
We did see the definition of cybersquatting enlarge somewhat in 2007. Typosquatting - owning the typo of a trademarked domain - became more clearly defined as a "black hat" practice, with some domainers being "outed" for owning such domains.
Here's where I'll get in trouble. The safest predictions for the future is that current trends will continue. For the most part I believe that this is true. I do think that domain parking will continue to be the dominent monetization model throughout 2008, but I also believe we will see creative competing models. The trend toward developing the best high-traffic domains will probably continue, although development has reportedly not been too successful for two-word lower-traffic generic domains. We will likely see a retreat back to parking pages for many of these sites. Investment bankers and others with money will continue to "discover" domain names, so valuations are likely to continue increasing.
Both
Domainers Magazine and
Modern Domainer should keep publishing in 2008. There appears to be enough ad revenue in this market to support both publications for now, but I'm not sure of how long. We will likely see a new rising star in domain parking and monetization in 2008. 2007's rising star was
Parked.com. While I have no reason to suspect that they will falter, the industry is young and new ideas emerge all the time.
The related fields of domaining, SEO, Affiliate marketing, and Internet marketing will continue to overlap as webmasters and domainers discover each other. As domainers develop their domains, SEO skills will become increasingly important. Internet marketers are discovering the importance of domain names in their overall success. This cross-fertilization should benefit everyone as communication increases and the field as a whole matures. I'll continue to comment on this here, but I'll also feature the best examples from these fields on the Tumblr blog
DomainerSEO.com. I hope to see many of you at
TRAFFIC Las Vegas in February. Drop me a line and let's get together to talk.
There was some news in December itself.
Parked and
Active Audience both reported some down time in December, and promised to compensate all affected.
Parked added a new feature that allows domain owners to drag-and-drop related keywords on and off the page.
Fabulous added a new security feature that allows domain owners to set a series of challenge/response security questions to protect important areas of their Fabulous.com account.
Internet security company McAfee published a
study on cybersquatting in December, blaming domain parking companies for contributing to the problem. Their study was really focused primarily on typosquatting. They found that the five most highly squatted categories are:
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Game sites (14% chance of being squatted)
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Airline sites (11.4% chance)
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Mainstream media sites (10.8%)
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Dating sites (10.2%)
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Technology and Web 2.0 sites (9.6%)
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Parked continues to send nice checks twice a month
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Sedo and Sedo Pro are the top Google-based services with one-click ads available for all domains
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TrafficZ is recommended for some of the best landing pages
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I will send this newsletter out monthly or when there have been significant changes in the domain name monetization industry. An extra issue may be sent when there is a major change
in a service that warrants your immediate attention. Back issues are available at NameMonetizer.com.
Leonard Holmes, Ph.D.
CEO, Healing Sites Network, LLC
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