It’s been a month now since I first installed the Democracy WordPress poll plugin. My first poll question was conceived after I met with a domain investing mogul, Matthew O’Brien of DotVentures.
To summarize the meeting, Mr. O’Brien of DotVentures is in the midst of developing a new alternative to parking domain pages. What is domain parking? You know when type in a web site address and you just see a page of links? That is domain parking. Domain parkers simply register domains to park the pages with contextual advertising links, and most often, have no intention of ever developing them. Parked domains containing contextual ads make millions of dollars every year. If they have a good domain, such as stockmarketquotes.com, for example, they will get a ton of natural traffic, and owning that domain would be very profitable.
Anyway, Mr. O’Brien is in the process of developing proprietary software which will create useful and unique mini web sites out of undeveloped domains. Additionally, these mini sites will utilize special search marketing software that will create more organic (search engine) traffic than most parked pages receive.
After meeting with DotVentures and learning about the future of domaining, I became convinced that domain parking was going the way of the dodo bird. For more information about the future of domaining, please read my meeting with a domain investing mogul.
My poll question was: “Is domain parking dead?” 90 people voted, total.
48 people (53% of all votes) voted they HOPE domain parking is dead.
12 people (13%) voted domain parking IS dead.
30 people (33%) voted they think domain parking is NOT dead.
According to DomainTools, there are over 86 million domains registered currently (of the main TLD’s, .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us). A huge percentage of those domains are undeveloped and simply sitting there doing nothing. Imagine those domains were providing the web with useful content.
I came across an interesting article questioning the ethical implications of parked domains combined with contextual advertising. In the article, the author says:
To make money with contextual advertising you want your content to be bad. Yes, you want it to be bad. You do not want the user to like what you have on the webpage or find what they are looking for in hopes that after not finding it, they will either do another search in your embedded Google search box or they will click one of the contextual ads on the page in hopes of finding what they came there to find.
The defenders of this type of website say they are “just another way for users to search and find what they are looking for.†What a crock. If that page never existed, the user would have clicked to a relevant website in the first place.
I understand the Internet is really just one big advertisement, but it is hard to argue that parked domains are doing anything more than just contributing to net-garbage. The same can be said about TV and commercials, however. Most TV is just garbage, but there is still plenty of useful and informational content. After you finish reading that article, tell me what you think about domain parking and if it is truly ethical.
i dont think you can really compare television to a parked domain
they both may very well be a form of garbage
but one of those forms of garbage actually provides a bit of value to tons of people
the other has value for one person and garbage for anyone else that sees it
I see your point. Maybe infomercials is a better thing to compare parked pages to. Infomercials don’t provide much value other than selling us stuff we don’t really need.
And I just wrote a post about how domain parking was booming! I honestly feel that domain parking with the correct spelling of domains is going to die, but the mispelled domain name parking is far from dead.
Ask HostGator how much they earn from that..
You will be amazed!
Domain parking is just like throwing up a billboard on undeveloped land, it defrays the cost of renewals while waiting to sell or develop. Theres a new company called Adegro that is doing the mini portals like the article refers to, its really just a more sophisticated form of parking meant to also gather organic search traffic to the ads.