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.

Comments

Re:One can only hope.

[Standmic]

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.

Re:One can only hope.

[trogdor8667]

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.

Getting a Dropped Name-

[microcars]

is a bit harder than you may realize

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have all my domains registered there and there was one that was expiring and ready to "drop" and I wanted it, so I registered to try to get it with GoDaddy.
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.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[ErroneousBee]

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.

Re:Mozilla did it right

[spir0]

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.