Making Proper Websites, Parking Them, and Selling

[BLazeD]

What does everyone think of this new trend... nowadays a lot of people seem to be building proper sites, making them so they get maybe 200 uniques per day, and then removing all the content, parking the site for 2 weeks, calling it a traffic domain, and selling it.

It seems obvious to me that a good bulk (if not all) of the traffic won't last once it is parked for long, and it's pretty deceptive behaviour in my opinion.

Yes, you can say buyers need to do their due diligence, but that shouldn't take away from what I think is a deceptive practise in the first place.

 

[whitebark]

Seems a bit silly considering a proper website usually brings in more people than a parked site, and you get to keep 100% of the revenue earned. You would earn more by selling it as a website earning income than a parked only site, one would think.

 

[Andrew Shaw]

Not if it gets good CTR, with a price tag of 30k, being only 16 months revenue. Especially if its being done on a large scale basis. Traffic isnt hard to come by these days. Proof of claims should be a bigger thing around here. I see stats, some obviously good, but some are all too often trickery, or misleading. Its possible that we can eliminate a lot of that by making it a must that people have to post daily stats, regardless of how long the list is and how many screenshots it takes. It will show the slightest bit of incline or decline in revenue over a larger scale. Good pointing that our blazed.

 

[GT Web]

This is the type of thing buyers need to watch for. It really isn't that hard to figure out when someone is trying to do this....

 

[whitebark]

Not if it gets good CTR

Well a 'proper' website should get a good CTR with real traffic. Excluding advertising like Adwords, purchased traffic rarely produces good CTR, and if it does, it's from places you don't want! If your website is doing 25% CTR, the parked page would have to be around 60% + to compensate for the revenue split. And for some parking companies that would have to be 110%+ :lol:

And yes, these pumped traffic domains are easy to spot.

 

[unholy1]

Well a 'proper' website should get a good CTR with real traffic. Excluding advertising like Adwords, purchased traffic rarely produces good CTR, and if it does, it's from places you don't want! If your website is doing 25% CTR, the parked page would have to be around 60% + to compensate for the revenue split. And for some parking companies that would have to be 110%+ :lol:

And yes, these pumped traffic domains are easy to spot.

Even with a good CTR on a website, you are still subject Google's smart pricing if you use Adsense. So even if you do get 100% of the revenue, it's 100% of what? 100% of the income from Ads Google serves to your site. If your site is new it is likely Google will serve the lower end of the Adwords pool.
I've been seeing this trend on my sites, the older more established sites are getting higher rev clicks than the new ones even if the CTR is about even, the number of clicks close and are in the same niche.

So in some cases Parking revenue is higher.

Back on topic, while this practice is going on, it has always been advised to check the history of the domain before buying. In fact you should always research before buying anything.

 

[stuartsdomains]

messageboards with fake members are also something to keep your eye on.

Messageboards that are for sale, with lots of members and posts, but are all in actual fact FAKE, are also something to be wary of