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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.
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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.
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Actually, it looks like the owner of Penisland.com knows exactly what his domain name looks like :)
PenIsland.net is what you were thinking of.
I've now found a great metaphor for all this "Web 2.0" nonsense: urine.
Web 2.0 is people pissing on the Internet!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
You know, something putting things in bold is a visually pleasing way of drawing more attention to topic sentences so people can skim instead of reading the whole article. But when you do it too much it just look like crap.
The change is going to be that the Internet is going to finally resemble a Möbius loop, where once you click on one content link and keep clicking, you will eventually wind up back where you started. People will be trapped in infinite loops of marketing and commerce will collapse because no one will actually be able to buy anything, because they can't break out of the loop.
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I've 'parked' the following domains for some time. Call it cyber squatting or whatever, but when a company comes along with these names, i'll be laughing all the way to the bank!!
.biz, .info, .org etc too. so don't think you can steal my idea!
www.XFmq1yw1pC3.com
www.QtEQpK1jGnm.com
www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com
www.bbyja3OWEVW.com
www.iQ7aE0YSTl8.com
www.tV56pze3idd.com
and i've got all the
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
At my company, we have a couple of hundred domain names that we don't currently use. We're not cyber-squatting, we are going to use them at some point in the future - but development time is always in short supply.
In any event, without even trying to sell them, we occasionally have people offer us money for a domain that we have. Sometimes it's a few hundred bucks, sometimes it's more. Just this week we agreed to sell one for $6500. If we were to make a full-time business out of it, I'm sure we could make a good bit of money.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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
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.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers back when Google results were essentially free of this type of nonsense. Even a very broad search would generally return useful results. For instance, searching for "toy firetruck" would return links to toy stores and antique toy dealers on the first few pages. Quality search results were the driving factor in switching from some other search engine to Google.
These days, however, results from a broad search usually return five or six pages of aggregators, domain parkers, and other foolishness. It's gotten to the point where I feel like if I don't have four or five search terms, it's not worth the effort of paging through the first six screens of useless results to get sort out the wheat from the chaf.
For the moment, with most web advertising operating on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis, people creating aggregators and parking domains are making money. I'm hopeful that as advertisers become more interested in tying views or clicks to actual sales, the incentive for putting this kind of useless fluff on the net will decrease. Of course, we'll still have not-so-net-savvy surfers who might click links on a parked page and then buy something. But if the intermediate pages led to useful information, they wouldn't be so annoying, would they?
Eventually, my bet is that there won't be enough profit in advertising to make domain parking worthwhile. May that day come soon.
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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
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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
I think it's because Firefox's developers don't think there's anything inherently wrong with ads.
This is besides the point; it's not about the inherent "rightness" or "wrongness" of ads, it's about whether people want them as part of their browsing experience or not, and whether the technology can deliver that. I think it's safe to say that, given the choice, most people would choose no ads over ads, therefore it would make sense that a browser give them that.
If a whole lot of people wanted white-on-black text, browsers would probably implement that, too. It's not an issue of whether white-on-black is inherently superior to black-on-white, it's just consumer demand.
The Firefox developers are choosing to pass up what could be a big boost to its popularity, because they don't want to give people something that I suspect most people want, or would find useful. I suspect it's because the Firefox project and the Firefox developers themselves draw revenue from advertising, and don't want to cut it off (or come under fire from people who's revenues might be impacted). To put it bluntly, it's a conflict of interest -- I'm not judging them for that, because it may be a necessary consequence of staying afloat as an organization -- but they have goals other than producing "the best browser" possible, which prevent them from putting in such a feature.
It's the same reason that TiVOs don't have automatic commercial skipping, even though such a thing would be possible to implement (and other projecs like MythTV do), and most people would probably think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are other considerations on the part of the manufacturer, which trump what would be best for the consumer.
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Mozilla makes money from google being their default search engine. Google makes money from ads. I doubt they want to actually include adblocker with it turned on. They have the extension, that is as far as they probably want to go.
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.
I for one welcome our new domain squatting masters.
No, really, I do. The consolidation of the domain squatting market makes it possible to do interesting stuff like NEVER go to their sites - eg a firefox plugin to check who's behind 'direct navigation' site names and, if its a squatter, take me to google instead. (I love how they say direct navigation like its something that users just started doing, that they might patent)
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)...
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
What he fails to see, of course, is that the profitability of domain parking was never in the "quality" of the appearence of the parked domain, but it was gotten by virtue of being the first people to snap up the most domains.
As mentioned in the article, most "domain parking companies" aren't grown, they're bought from companies that own domains already and then slowly added to by using automated tools to snatch up new good domains.
How is this article
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.
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.
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What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis?
This could get worse as the exploiters get smarter. They are automatically generating realistic web sites based on word associations, which will fool search engines and the public, much like spam content is picking up context.
I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.
With the money spammers are making, you have to wonder what they are doing behind the scenes to shore up their position. They are completely amoral as long as the money keeps rolling in.
The web could become as useless as email. Soon we'll need a turing test for each letter typed.
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.
ICANN is subsidizing this garbage industry to the tune of about $300,000,000 to $500,000,000 per year - yes every year - out of our pockets.
This is because the "domainers" get free domain name registration tryouts while the rest of us are forced to pay a ICANN-fiat "registry fee" of about $7 per name per year.
The ratio of our full-time registrations to these freeebies is about 1:200. In other words, each of our paid domains is paying the costs for 200 of these "domainers".
ICANN allows this, but it never really was presented to the board of directors for approval (I know, I was on the board at the time). ICANN should stop it and make the registry-fee match the actual costs that Verisign and PIR and others incurr to handle the back-room registry function - a fee that, rather than ICANN's $7 probably ought to be about $0.02 per year - a savings for you and me of more than $300,000,000 per year, every year.
Like a plugin that checks the netblock of the result of a DNS lookup on a URL... if it's in a range of known parking sites or phising sites, it'd throw up an appropriate error/blocked page.
That'd be a neat extension to have.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But soon Google and Yahoo, who provide most of the ads on parked sites, found that click-throughs from parked pages often didn't lead to sales, and many advertisers didn't want to buy AdWords and then have them show up on these sites with no content. Some of the largest parking services began switching to a pay-per-action business model, instead of pay-per-click.
Meanwhile, venture capital firms started pumping money into the sector, buying up registrars (like Demand Media's deals for eNom and BulkRegister) and large domain portfolios. Vector Capital bought Register.com, and Perot has a piece of Internet REIT. The VCs and Wall Street investors prefer to monetize their domains with developed web sites instead of parked pages. Many of them are using free user generated content to populate these sites with articles and forums linked to their target keywords. Google likes these sites better, and they appear to get more relevant traffic and click-throughs.
But there will always be plenty of smaller operators with thousands of single-page ad-filled parked domains. The low price of domains means there's virtually no barrier for entry into this business, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
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.
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That's when the lightning bolt hit me: You'd have a company that generates its own traffic, generates its own content, and monetizes itself. It would be the perfect lazy-man's media company!"
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So he sees social networking not as a way to give users voices or a place to share ideas, but as a way to monetize them and to get users to generate free content. People aren't going to use a site that treats its users like free content machines and not people, especially not when there are sites like Blogger and Livejournal that give users control over their content and don't post ads. Even the ad-filled Facebook always makes sure to keep users informed, respond to feedback, and keep the ads to a reasonable level. If you don't respect your users, they'll quickly find someplace else to go.
Also, why in the world do we need another social networking site? There have been tons of competitors to MySpace and Facebook, and none of them have really caught on. Remember that this guy didn't develop MySpace; he just found a way to make lots of money by selling it.
The arrogance of this guy's plan to get users to do the work for him while he makes bundles of money is astounding, and I don't think that people will stand for it.
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