There’s been much talk in the last few weeks about parking revenue and its impact on the domain industry in its entirety.
While it’s safe to say that domain parking revenue may not ever return to the “good old days”, I found what Mike Berkens had to say about parking revenue and the role it vital role it plays to be interesting, to say the least.
Nearly a decade ago, Mike expressed that the drop parking revenue has drastically decreased live domain auction overall sales — auctions going from over $10M in sales to just under $2M.
Michael Gilmour — domain investor, developer, and founder of ParkLogic — shared a unique perspective towards domain monetization in general while expressing his concerns, in short order, that many of today’s domain investors lack clarity and understanding about how domain monetization actually works today.
Both articles are certainly worth their time in reading and reviewing.
I have personally never considered domain parking to truly be a lucrative source of income — although Gilmour’s reasoning and perspective is enough to make me reconsider at surface level.
In fact, I have approximately 1,200 domains parked using GoDaddy’s CashParking service over the last 7 years — number of domains fluctuating each year up or down a couple of hundred or so.
Over the years, I bring in a measly $3.50 per day on average, and at least $1,200 annually.
However, last month I witnessed a bit of “lightning in the bottle” when I discovered a spike in domain parking revenue, thanks to a single click totaling $64.85 for a geo service domain: katygaragedoors.com.
Based on the domain name and industry it serves, I will sometimes purchase expiring geo service domains, and develop each into a 5-10 page website in an attempt to rank and sale the website, or simply sale the leads.
As for katygaragedoors.com, I never got around to developing this name in the last two years, but consider this anomalous revenue a win that has at least paid for its renewals for a couple of years.
But again, this is a blue moon experience for one out of nearly 1,200 parked domains. Could I do better? Perhaps I could.
But realize that I never knew nor experienced the “good old days” of domain parking revenue tallying up thousands of dollars monthly as some of the early domain investors alluded too.
Although, having read Gilmour’s post, I’m inclined to contact Park Logic to inquire of their domain monetization solution(s) for a few of the top performing domains parked with GoDaddy.
In my opinion, domain parking revenue is most beneficial for domain investors with single word domains that trend well, and not so much for run of the mill two or more word domains with light to no traffic at all.
What has been your experience with domain parking services or domain monetization in general?
BullS says
Have you tried other parking,and see how much $$$$$ they can bring in?
Bul says
Alvin,
Domain parking is DEAD. I don’t care what they tell you. Its DEAD. I have owned more than 7k domains spanning 15 years and I am yet to see the results back then. What fueled revenues during the old days is poor browser perfomance, low clickbait, low phising scams and dump search habits. All those issue are old news. Unless its direct type in traffic, there is zero likelyhood that someone is going to search google and end up with results to justify going through parked links. One a large portfolio, I should be seeing something. NOTHING to justify the effort.
John Colascione says
I tend to believe the consensus of parking being totally DEAD, to be accurate. If you have great domains sitting around doing nothing it would be a good idea to test out these mythical systems for the better of the community, but probably a waste of time. I mostly developed all my names that were remotely valuable and didn’t park much. At anytime I have, mostly just when parking a name to test the waters of selling it, I never remember seeing anything even remotely promising making me want to scale a parking operation. It was a different game year ago when sites could receive search traffic, but those days are long gone. When people didn’t expect to just search for everything they would take a guess which resulted in much more type in traffic. I remember building my own custom parked pages, just to keep them indexed in search, and that worked a tiny bit, but it is no longer aloud..