No, parking companies are not closing shop, YET.
As reported on many of the domainer sites Google is now allowing domain owners to directly park with them. Use this link to view the details directly from Google’s blog.
I will be the first to go on record and say that this time next year parking companies will be obsolete. Does this mean run and move all of your domain names to Google, absolutely not. Just like anything new it has to be tested and tweaked several times before its right. As of now you will still gain more traffic and money by parking companies. With a parking company you have more control over the keywords used, optimization, visual appearance and content.
This will change, Google will have these things worked out and perfected, it will just take time.
In the mean time, while they are working out the details, get your domains parked. I know too many domainers that do nothing with their domains. Once they are acquired they sit, why not park them in the mean time and earn a couple dollars? I have accounts with Sedo and Parked, each have their own benefits. If selling your domain name through Sedo or GreatDomains is your goal then park with Sedo. By parking your domain with them you avoid the $50 minimum sales charge. If your looking for greater flexibility and higher payouts, Parked is the way to go.
yeah, I saw this this morning. I don’t really agree with your statment about parking companies deying out. A lot of people went crazy with adsense and adwords and it did not work out for them, so they went back to the old ways of advertising and monetizing the Internet.
That’s why other 1st and 2nd tier ad networks continue to exist and more and more affiliate networks are created constantly. I work for one of the top 2nd tier network and I often see how all of the 2nd tier affiliate and domain parking networks simply hand each other the same traffic either directly or indirectly via a 3rd competitor/partner (when the traffic has been deemed of low quality and blocked by one of the partners).
I do agree with you on domainers not monetizing their domains. I have few hundred domains that have been sitting for few years now. Now I am building domainventory.com so I can actually make back some of the money I have spend over the years on registering and renewing the domains.
Hey Alexander, I appreciate your comment.
You just never know, Google and every company for that matter is reaching for ways to improve there bottom line.
Only three to five years ago parking companies did not exist, only the registrars were allowed to profit from ad revenue. This was not the choice of registrar companies but the choice of Google and Yahoo. They are the ones that allow parking companies to stay in business. They can go back to the way it was and only allow registrars to profit. I do not see this happening because Parking does benefit them as well. Sites are optimized therefor bring in extra revenue. BUT, as Andrew from DNW.com said this could viewed as a leveraging tool to lower payouts.
Time will tell, I have a 50/50 shot of being right
Say it isn’t so! What will happen to my daily $0.10 payouts with my parking company?
Boy am I going to miss the $.01 -$.03 clicks
I actually think its better to develop sites rather than to park.
Hi to everyone,
i am new to this ,i would like to know if i can move my parked domains from one to unother company any time , thank you in advance.
Yes Fero, you can. All you have to do is setup a new account where you would like to park your names and move your DNS.
I also disagree that parking companies will be gone by this time next year, they will find alternative methods of parking or will be in a position to offer higher payouts using other providers like Yahoo and maybe MS. They will also concentrate more on their domain sales channels like Sedo and Moniker have.
I also think that MFA parking companies like VentureNames.com will offer higher PPC revenue than Google’s own parking system because I can guarantee that Google will cap the PPC on their AdSense for Domains feeds in relation to their standard AdSense ads.
Just my 2c..
Adsense for Domains is now a strong competitor of the very parking services they feed. It is a viable option to parking companies.
Whether it is a successful competitor and option, we’ll have to wait and see but I wouldn’t bet against Google.
I will say that I would be pretty pissed off and/or scared that Google is going direct to my customers.
I will say too that there will be less parking companies around this time next year.
They will merge or die. Some will have a “run” by their customers where so many domains leave they one or more simply won’t be able to survive.
I get the sense that parking companies are in the same position as the newspaper business… a dying industry.
That is really too bad and that will probably have an effect on the valuation of all domains. People will speculate less on domains because the simple revenue won’t be there anymore.
Only time shall tell.
I dont think we shall see any parking companies disappearing for at least 18 – 24 months.
Most people shall be scared to walk away from nice parking payments and risk it with Google!
Also Google might not pay aswell as everyone is thinking – They can offer this service and keep more cash but give us the same as we got before so wheres the advantage?
We really need to wait and see what happens but I tell what would be a good interview for you to do Patrick – Get Donny from Parked.com back and see what he has to say about it.
Regards,
Robbie
Emailed Donny right after posting the article, I too am curious to see what he has to say.
I just heard back from Donny and no comment for the record
I think domain parkings will not close shop. Domainers may try to test the waters at Google. If the benefits of parking with Google will not outweigh that of domain parkings, domainers who own hundred or more domains would prefer staying with their old parking services.
I think the parking companies will just evolve into traffic exchange networks with hybrid site builders.
I can’t imagine Google won’t be trying to tie this into their /a apps platform and encouraging people to start down the path of developing their sites, even if it is with their cheezy site builder.
the thing I find more interesting is the hypocritical nature (again) of google’s position. They’ll punish your for a MFA site, consider it search engine spam to have duplicate content on your site… Yet here they go down the slippery slope themselves.
i wager you’ll be able to add fees from google groups and blog search within a year to your site builder content to help you develop your name.
They’ll ban article spinners and sites like articlemarketingautomation.com from auto posting content to blogger, yet in the end, how different is that from posting RSS feeds to your site and using google.com/friendconnect to add (duplicate) content from your friends sites, blogs and photo galleries.
Anyway… I think the moral is that parking companies need to evolve their publishing platforms to be able to compete with other content development platforms…
Helping people monetize their names is the purpose of a parking company, they’ll just have to get a little more sophisticated as the landscape changes.
Companies like Dotzup are already more selective about what names they’ll accept, looking for strong generic type in potentials, I just see that extending as parking companies move from web1.0 static page frameworks (arguably the ultimate MFA sites) to more web2.0 content and publishing networks.
The smartest one’s will take advantage of google’s own API’s to draw in and create mashup’s from their content.
That’s my 2cents anyway
I’ve always been curious about WhyPark.com’s efforts (and related). Seems like a great idea, but their content just isn’t that good (my opinion). I wouldn’t return to the sites they create.
I wonder if Google will index sites they park differently than sites parked at SEDO?