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The Death of Domain Parking?
An anonymous reader found an article about the former CEO of MySpace moving into the domain parking biz. He says "I thought, it can't be that easy. So I talked to some domainers, and they said, 'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'" The idea behind the business doesn't really seem any better to me than just having a parked name with a banner ad. At least, not for the internet as a whole.
Or maybe we should just make sure that our browsers are equipped with the best ad-blocking technology by default. Why isn't Adblock a part of Firefox? I realize that it's probably best for me that the lambda user doesn't know about ad-blocking as there is little incentive to develop anti-ad-blocking technology but it doesn't seem right to let people profit by polluting the net with garbage sites.
Firstly, the randomly scattered bold text is a pretty big hint that this article is advertising copy designed to impress the very, very stupid.
Cutting through the "let's promote lame advertising models" rah-rah, it looks like the idea here is to assume people typing a random keyword into their address bar are searching for a forum and/or wiki on a topic. So these folks want to create some sort of ur-forum (that is, they want to reinvent a modern usenet) and figure buying up a bunch of idle domain names to advertise it is a good starting point.
This would pretty much be the "death of domain parking" at least in the form of a sell-off-the-assets exit strategy. I have no idea why they would buy any domain that wasn't an obvious word or term, though, so if you're holding on to that hot "ilemonstore2003.cx" property you're probably out of luck.
That is exactly his idea, except he also wants to add a heavyweight "forums" page or somesuch to further waste your bandwidth every time you make a spelling mistake.
He's doing it for the SEO. Bold words help pages rank higher in google for those keywords.
Developers: We can use your help.
Try this article, http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03 /how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain/ from Mike Davidson (of Newsvine) on how he grabbed the Newsvine.com domain.
I've read numerous articles that state that GoDaddy does register domains and park them, as you said. They make tons of money off of this, because they can then sell you the backorder service. For this reason, I have stopped using GoDaddy to search for available domain names. I use tucows domain search, or r4l.com and search there, then later register it on GoDaddy when I'm sure I want said domain.
But I had also read the story (posted in a reply below somewhere) about how the whole business of getting "dropped" domains worked.
Basically if the Registrar "drops" the domain from it's system, whoever happens to be there at the precise moment it "drops" can snag it.
It's like being part of a hungry mob in a street and someone is throwing a piece of candy off a 10-story building.
Your chances of getting it increase if you have Longer Arms, are Taller and have also brought as many other people acting on your behalf along as well to try to "catch" it.
I ended up registering with several "Drop Catchers" and when the domain I wanted did drop...GoDaddy was NOT one of the "winners"
however- one of the "Drop Catchers" I had registered with DID get it.
however- more that one entity had registered for that domain with that "Drop Catcher" so it promptly went off to an auction.
I dropped out when it went over $800, the name went to one of these guys in the Cayman Islands and will now and forever be one of those crappy place-holder on-page domains that you might happen upon if you clicked an old link to the website that used to be there.
I like microcars
Ive just been looking for a bike. Decided Kona Cladera looked OK, of off to the maufacturer website for specs:
Searching for "Kona Caldera" just pulls what appears to be an infinite number of shops
http://www.kona.com/ - Hawian island.
http://www.konabikes.com/ - parked, knows Kona are a cycle manufacturer and hosts loads on links, but none to Kona's site.
http://www.konacycles.com/ - parked with adsense links of no specific type.
Turns out its http://www.konaworld.com/ but the site is just a shop with no more details than other shops.
And that, folks, is how parking works. It relies on all the chaff generated by online sellers causing searchers to try more direct methods of getting at the information.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
If you hold the domains for less than 5 days at a time, then you can do this for free (aside from a deposit). Ironically (given the subject of this thread) it is Bob Parsons, of GoDaddy, who explains the process: http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html
AdBlock Plus (at least, I think it's AdBlock Plus, maybe it's AdBlock2) does a fairly good job of this; when you enable the blocking, you choose from a list of well-known blacklists with short descriptions (what language/geography they're tailored to, who maintains it, etc.). You can load your own, naturally, but if you just want "zero effort" ad-blocking, it does a fairly good job. Here's the current list.
There would undoubtedly be some wrangling over who's list got to be the default, or at the top of the list of options, but you could order it with some neutral metric (number of unique downloads per day? Google Ranking?) if it became a point of contention.
You don't want to include a blacklist with the software itself, because they become obsolete too quickly, and for obvious reasons you don't want to stick the user with one that's hard to update or change. Using a subscription-based system that lets the user choose between lists is fairly simple, yet powerful, and allows users to move to a different list if they desire a different level or focus on blocking. (E.g., some lists are more minimalist, others take a more expansive interpretation of "ads," and most are tailored to a particular language.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Firefox can do this too.
right click on any search box and choose "add a keyword for this search"
for example, if you add a keyword for google's search box, and call it 'g' then you can just type 'g ' and it will feed those search words into google.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
While there's some basis to what you're saying, it could also be very misleading. Consider this scenario: someone registers a million .com domains, returns 990,000 of the 3 days later, and pays for only 10,000 of them. They're paying about $70,000 to their registar ($7 a domain), and of the $7, something like a buck goes to ICANN, 50 cents goes to the registrar, and the rest goes to Verisign (or something like that - I'm going by memory). ICANN gained a net revenue of around $10,000, and that will be an annual $10,000 if the registrant renews those domains annually (they'll probably let some expire, but keep most). ICANN's cost for allowing the person to register 990,000 domains and return them is negligible...it's moving maybe a gigabyte of data around here and there, inserting and removing from a database...there's some cost, but it's a lot less than $10,000. So ICANN has a net gain. They're not losing $300 million a year as a result of this sort of thing - they're increasing their revenue. If they didn't do this, those 10,000 domains the person tried before keeping would not have been registered...maybe 100 or 1,000 would have been, through other analysis techniques, but not all of them, so ICANN would have made less money.
Now, you're right that ICANN never really explicitly planned or approved this practice. It was in fact designed as a way to allow registrars who make mistakes to return domains due to system bugs or other problems. It's been used in ways that were not foreseen. Personally I don't like it or think it's a good practice, but that's how it is. Even so, I see it as improving ICANN's finances, not diminishing them. I think describing it as ICANN subsidizing the domain registrants is misleading.
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