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.

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.