The Evolution Of Domain Parking

[ParkLogic]

Domain parking is dead and should have been buried a long, long time ago. This is what I see written in domain forums over and over again. I’m left with two questions, “Why hasn’t it died?” and “What’s next?”

There are a number of reasons why domain parking hasn’t died and the first being that domain investors continue to support the business model. Let’s face it, all you have to do is change your nameservers and voila! Money starts pouring into your bank account…..that’s the theory anyway.

The reality is that I end up spending a huge amount of my time ensuring that ParkLogic clients have their nameservers set correctly and that the domains are actually still in the right parking accounts. When was the last time you audited all of your domains? Trust me when I say that about 10% of your revenue is being lost by not doing this.

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There is one thing for sure about domain parking is that it’s scalable. There are very few barriers to the number of domains that you can park but there are barriers to managing your domain portfolio. For example, at about 5,000 domains you will probably discover that vlookup in Excel becomes your best friend.....even if your domains are successfully parked.

Given the alternatives for domains with more than 1 unique visitor per day domain parking is actually incredibly profitable. Sure, you could build out a domain into a business but given the cost of development you better make sure that you choose the right one that will go gang busters and make a bucket of money to offset the development cost.

This conversation is all very interesting but what I’m really interested in is what’s next?

One option would be that all domainers suddenly decided to invest in development and take all of their domains out of parking and somehow build thousands of profitable sites.

I see a couple of barriers to this business model. The cost (as mentioned above) but more importantly the management time. Let’s imagine that you have a thousand sites, how do you manage them all so that you can effectively impact each one? This is a really tough ask and one that bears a lot of thinking about.

This causes me to think about the other side of the equation, the parking companies themselves. If you really think about it, all of them have roughly the same Google contracts (ignoring Yahoo companies) so they’re really competing on their technology….I like that!

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