Quick Chat with Donny Simonton – Voodoo

By: RH

A quick chat with Donny Simonton – Voodoo.com

Donny it seems everyone wants to post on forums and blogs that parking is dead, Is parking Dead ?

The idea that parking is dead usually comes up every 6 months or so. 
It’s usually brought up by the same people who have decent domains that
just don’t have a lot of natural traffic.  And when you don’t have
traffic, parking your domain is probably not the best way for you to
generate money from the domain.  If you have natural traffic on your
domain, it’s really hard to beat parking your domain without fully
developing it.

This is one of those questions that gets asked quite a bit.  To me it’s
domains that have traffic; those are the best domains to park with us. 
We accept traffic from every country in the world.  We accept IDN
domains.  We accept domains from all categories.  Basically we accept
pretty much every type of domain that is out there and our just job is
to help you make the most money from that domain.

My finance team tells us that we are paying out an insanely high
revenue share, and I have no plans on lowering it.  Just ask around we
seem to be paying out a lot more than the other guys.

We usually classify traffic into 4 categories, desktop, tablets,
smartphones, and dumbphones.  Desktop and Smartphone traffic are usually
on par with each other as far as RPM goes.  Tablets usually have the
highest RPM and Dumbphones have the lowest.

Mobile traffic has definitely been increasing since the beginning of
the year, but desktop traffic has been staying very steady as well.  I
would have expected to see a drop in the percentage of desktop traffic
when there was an increase in mobile traffic.  But overall, the numbers
continue to go higher month over month.

I remember 11 years ago when I first got my hands on a domain parking
feed and I thought the whole concept of parking domains was a joke. 
Back then I had hundreds of domains that didn’t make any money and in
most cases I could barely afford the renewal fees.  But over time it
began to grow on me and I started to see how you could actually create a
business on buying, selling, and parking domains with traffic.  The
business has changed over the years, but the overall concept is still
the same 11 years later.

I think you will continue to have a thriving domain parking business in
the next five years.  If ICANN has its way we will have another 1,500
or so new gTLDs, with half of them failing within 5 years.  .com will
still be king.  Domain parking companies will continue to be around,
whether it’s helping you monetize your domain, helping you buy a domain,
or helping you sell a domain, as long as domains are around, parking
companies will be around.

Are you going to start your own sales platform?

We have been working with a few clients on creating a domain sales
platform that will be integrated in our Voodoo.com domain parking
platform.  It will allow you to handle everything yourself, allow us or
one of our approved brokers to handle the transaction, or just allow us
to handle the escrow for you.  It will be completely up to you how much
or how little you want to be involved in the whole process.  For most
domainers domain sales is just another source of income and we want to
make the process as easy as possible.

Thank you very much for your time Donny, all the best to you and Voodoo.