Sedo is doing extremely well for us, and it vindicates their strategy of maintaining a parking program dedicated to monetizing quality domains with natural direct navigation traffic --- through ads matching a visitor's interests.
When other parking firms were jumping on the arbitrage bandwagon, allowing anyone and their dog to send crappy traffic to domain names of dubious quality, Sedo knew the future of the business was with a business model where everyone wins --- the domain owner, the advertiser, the web visitor, Google as the ad provider, and Sedo itself. Frankly, I hate the term "parking", and I wish the domain industry wouldn't sound so defensive about using parked pages.
Sedo and the other responsible parking firms are providing a tremendous service to advertisers and web visitors alike. Aside from the revenues, I get a great deal of satisfaction to look at our parked pages to see advertisers big and small reaching the exact targeted audience they seek. Where else can a small company advertise at such a reasonable cost, reaching the same market as much larger rivals?
I have many parked pages with a 30% or higher CTR. It is especially important to set "Related Links" specifically related to the domain topic. On some domains, "related links" account for a large percentage of the clicks. Some "related links", while not getting a lot of traffic, have a 100% CTR.
In my opinion, it is extremely important to to provide a quality experience for the web visitors, so that they will return to your pages full of interesting ads. I never use pop-ups, and I provide keywords and "related links" which bring advertisers matching the domain name subject. As often as possible, I use the control panel to visit the main parked page and related pages, to insure that the ads which appear are relevant. It is unfortunate that some advertisers, in an effort to reach what they think is a "wider audience", are selecting keywords for the ads which aren't relevant to the product or service.
I also believe that it is extremely important to select a photo matching the domain topic.
Yes, we would all like to find the time to develop more websites with original content. But, we have nothing to be ashamed of in providing a valuable service through "parking".
---Ed