2. Parking Domain Names

by Das Brain

For those of you out there who are not familiar with the domain monetization business, the term “domain parking” might sound funny. But, essentially that is exactly what it is, the domains are like parking lots on a busy city street where there is lots of traffic, and when a visitors comes by and pays, its like someone clicking on an ad. The domain makes money.

You basically hand over your domain name to a middle man / domain parking company, by forwarding your domain or changing the DNS pointer. When a visitor types in your domain name the domain parking company will present a generic page with Google and Yahoo ads on it that is relevant to the domain name. So, if you had a domain name called “suv-wheels.com” then ads about wheels and rims would appear, and when the visitor clicks on an ad you make some money.

Take for instance one domain from my own domains portfolio. The domain name is motorcycle related and is a mis-spell of a generic term. Below are the parking stats for this year so far:
Jan – Feb 5, 2007

Domain Name: motoyclehelmet.???<--don't visit do not want to generate false view stats.

Revenue:
US$ 1.43
Views: 8
Clicks: 3
CTR: % 37.50
Avg PPC: US$ 0.48

So, first of all let’s define what the headings mean.
Domain Name is self explanatory.
Revenue is how much the domain name made for a certain period of time in revenue (after sharing revenue with Domain Parking service).
Views means how many times the domain name has been visited by internet users, usually by direct navigation or type-in traffic….sometimes by linked url.
Clicks is how much times visitors have actually clicked on an advertisement link on the domain parking page.
Avg PPC is the average you make per click. PPC stands for Pay Per Click.

So you see that my motorcycle related domain got 8 views in the last month. If that continues at the same rate that would be like 96 views per year. Not a whole lot of traffic right? But hold on a minute, it has already earned $1.43 in one month. If this continues for 12 months then total revenue per year would be $17.16.

This domain only cost me $7 to register, and if it brings in $17.16 a year, that is $10.16 profit on one domain name that is parked. Imagine, if you had 200 domains making $10 a year, that would be $2000 a year, not bad and all from sitting back and letting internet visitors click away. That is great passive income.

However, I think that this motorcycle related domain will be getting more than 8 views a month in the next few months. The reason is that internet traffic and earnings for any domain is variable and depends on the subject of the keyword of the domain. The example domain name is motorcycle related right? So currently in January and February people are not going to be searching for motorcycle accessories. Also advertisers are not going to put a lot of internet advertising dollars behind the Google and Yahoo keywords for motorcycle accessories, but when spring time rolls around both traffic and advertising dollars (Avg PPC will be higher) will increase. This means the potential to make more from my parked domain is there. With that said, I think this domain name will make much more than $17.16 this year.

Each click revenue is split between you the domain name owner, the domain parking service, and whoever is providing the advertisement link feed. So let’s say if a website visitor clicks on an ad, and it was a Google ad that paid 80 cents. Your portion might be 20%, the domain parking service might get %40, and Google will get %40. So your revenue on that click is 16 cents.  Only the domain parking service and Google knows the exact split in revenue.  Read the next post or article on Developing Micro Websites to learn how to make a bigger portion of the click revenue.

I currently have about approximately 200 domains parked right now with NAMEDRIVE domain parking service, I like them and highly recommend them. There link is below.
Once in while, I will register a new domain name and park it to gauge traffic on it.

If this sounds interesting to you, here are a few domain parking services that you should look into:

NAMEDRIVE
DomainSponsor
Sedo.com
TrafficClub
AfterNIC

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One Response to “2. Parking Domain Names”

  1. [...] When a website visitor clicks on a relevant Google Adsense ad or Yahoo Publisher Network ad, they you make money. Also, if the website visitor clicks on an affilliate link and buys the product from the affilliate, you will get a commission from that sale. One big advantage of micro websites as opposed to domain name parking is that you get a bigger chunk or portion of the ad revenue. If the adsense click paid 80 cents, you are more likely to receive 40-50% of that revenue. So about 32 cents to 40 cents. Please read my article or post on Domain Name Parking to find out how domain parking services pay out. the Below is an example of one of my micro websites. [...]