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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.
Domain parking is just another form of internet garbage, like half-assed "portal" sites, and spam.
It's only sense to know that there will forever be garbage, and that we will forever be looking for ways to sort through that garbage for the good stuff.
Looking at it, you'd think that domain parking wouldn't be half as profitable as it is. We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.
Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.
Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Article title: "The death of domain parking?"
Article body: "unrelated information"
Article comes free with idiotic terms like "domainers" (not a word) when what they mean is "squatter".
It's just a euphemism. Anybody with a brain will see right though it. It's no better than calling URL spammers "search engine optimizers".
Question everything
A professional society I belong to has just gone to set up a website, and discovered that its acronym is being squatted on by a "domainer" - no content at all there except for Google ad links to misc. stuff not even related to the acronym.
We have hundreds of thousands of domain names that could effectively and efficiently be used by real organizations as the most direct and obvious addresses to connect with them, but are instead being subsidized by Google to effectively obfuscate the Net. This means that if you really want to find a firm's or organization's site, you increasingly have to use Google to find the domain name they've settled for, since the obvious ones are taken up by these Google-subsidized squatters.
Google does evil here, and for their own ends. It would be simple for them to set standards as to where their ad links can be placed, and put this whole lecherous horde out of business, freeing up the domain name system to work according to its original design. What are the odds Google'll ever even consider this? Slim to none, because Google does evil. They're stinking rich, but they just want more, by any means, even when those means degrade the quality of much of the Web.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If I see a piece of land, and think "McDonalds will want to put a franchise here." and then buy it, I'm a forward thinking business man. If I do the same thing on the internet, suddenly I'm some sort of 'bad' guy.
It's just people making money by thinking ahead.
No, I am not one of these people, but wish I had gotten in when I thought to do it in the 90s. I could use 20million a year with less then 3 million in expenses.
damn.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The one idea I've thought of which could prevent this is to make it progressively more expensive to own more domain names. e.g. The first 10 domain names are $10/yr each. Domain names 11-50 are $100/yr each. Domains 50-100 are $1,000/yr each. And so on. There really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive. True you could set up a sprawling network of shell corporations and paid underlings, but the paperwork necessary to maintain them would quickly become overwhelming without incurring additional costs.
When I read the subject of this I got excited. I thought maybe, just maybe there were going to be some rules set about how long you can park a domain for -- making it more of a hastle for scammers and squaters to just sit on domains with nothing more than an ad on the site... I'm normally not one to opt for control, but if I can go out and buy just about every mispelling of microsoft or google or whatever possible and sit on them or even have them forward to my site, well that just seems crazy. and if you're rich from selling a business, internet land is cheap... dirt cheap... do we really want a warren buffet of the world to own everything?
I admit that I haven't researched what regulations do exist, but I'm not aware of anything in place to prevent this besides the cost (which is not much as the article mentions)...
No, you're a real-estate speculator not a business man. Businessmen create and run businesses, generate employment for others, service their customers and stimulate the economy. Real-estate speculators, currency traders, domain squatters, ticket scalpers and people who sell PS3s on eBay are just ignorant jerks who are gaming the system to enrich themselves while providing no useful service.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You don't understand what's being discussed. As a "domainer" you didn't buy the lot to later sell it to McDonalds, you bought the lot so McDonalds can't. You put billboards up, instead. That's even less useful than McDonalds.
You also have to realize that if Firefox included an ad blocker for all ads, many content providers that survive on ad revenue would stop developing for that browser. It would take a lot less time for most developers to write pages that only have to worry about IE. It's still got the greater market share and it costs extra money to comply with both browsers. If you knew that you were spending money to accommodate traffic that was going to eschew your revenue generator, would you continue to spend that money?
Probably not.
Firefox realizes that. They make it possible to plugin and block ads, but making that a default setting would marginalize them in the eyes of ecommerce developers and as soon as that happened, they would be marginalized in the development process.
Sure 99% of domains would be dropped. However, a huge chunk of that number would be legitimate domains used by ordinary people. I own a domain which I use to host a blog, and small tools designed for public use. I make essentially zero revenue connected with it - a total gross of about $10 over four years. If the price of a domain was raised to $50, I would be priced out of the market, as would many other legitimate owners and even some small businesses. The web would become the territory of the wealthy - exactly what the media conglomerates want.
Everyone should search on (at least) 30 new domain names per day
Fill the bilges with swill - keep searching - keep searching - keep the scoopers busy...
Woahh, woah, hang on. Where the hell do you live, Africa? This is a ridiculous argument. You almost certainly make enough money to fund a measly $50/yr for your TLD. If it's not worth even that much to you, you should be asking yourself whether you even need it and considering getting a subdomain from a hosting provider or something; you can probably get them for free somewhere. I totally reject your argument.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.