Share your experiences with what you've done with parking or developing.

Hmm, I think this is one term that is vastly misunderstood and misused. I don't think there is such a black and white picture between development and parking, it's more of a continuum. You don't want to be in the business of developing domains, you want to be in the business of developing revenue streams.

To that extent, when you're optimizing a domain or network of domains, you're already developing it to some extent. Domainers are great at understanding macro mining patterns but pay little attention to micro variations or business niches in general. When we start optimizing income streams, we're looking at user behavior and trying to understand what people want. Beyond that, understanding what subset of those users can be converted into customers and where they should be converted. Is it homogeneous user intent where everyone is gravitating to a given site/product/niche or are people all over the place? Where people are focused, is there a clean method for conversion (generally within the context of savvy advertisers). There's nothing worse than pairing high quality conversion traffic with a lousy advertiser who cannot convert.

From our perspective, we dropped the mantra of "development" a long time ago. A domain is a segment in a conduit that matches user intention with advertisers. It's been spoken of for years that the goal of this conduit is to find 1:1 relationships between apprpriate advertisers and internet users. Today we use google/yahoo because they control the advertising base and ultimately we're designed to know very little about our traffic. (As very clearly illustrated by what whizzbang has been speaking about now for over a year). We send traffic to parking companies who send traffic to google/yahoo who sends traffic to advertisers. At each stage valuable information is lost if:

1) The advertiser doesn't inform google of what traffic converts. Google does gain some of this info from unsavvy advertisers but successful conversions are as valuable to advertisers as traffic is to domainers so it's typically kept close to home.
2) Google shares some information with parking companies based upon revenue of given traffic and/or clicks. I haven't actually seen an API yet so I'm not sure what exact information is being shared. I'd love to add our tech resources to pull apart and understand a feed however if someone's willing.
3) We all know what information a parking company shares with the domainer.
4) What kind of information do you share with a visitor to your domain?

At any rate, I guess what I'm saying is that from our perspective it's worthwhile to break the concept of development. We have "developed" a number of our domains where we've found great matching advertisers. In one case we're running a white label relationship where through non-comp agreements we have our own brand and control over pricing and customer base. Namely, right now we set our prices at 10-18% markup and find the typical visitor converts into 3 purchases on average. Is it a huge winfall over parking, actually it's not because the niche is so highly developed that advertisers are paying through the teeth to get those visitors. Do we make more money, yes definitely because we're:

1) Not sharing revenue with the Parking company.
2) Not sharing revenue with Google/Yahoo.
3) Earning based upon repeat conversions, not a metric that estimates conversions based upon IPs & timestamps.

That said, we're also not earning revenue anymore off of the non-targeted traffic so there is some balancing.

We've also torn down a development a few times and reverted to parking where the advertisers themselves couldn't convert on traffic and we made more forcing them to pay PPC. A little crazy considering how inefficient things are through conversions at each revenu sucking step.

That is a GREAT post!
Would you mind if I used it as an article? I think that more people need to read this.

Glad it was well received. Sure feel free to repost it if you like.

"You don't want to be in the business of developing domains, you want to be in the business of developing revenue streams."

I couldn't agree with this more. For those of us who were late to the domain game, we were left with domains that didn't bring in 100's of visitors per day per name organically. The answer was to build something around the name.

A lot of us have been in the Internet industry for a long time - and our background has been one of development, networking, systems, programming, and community building. To have a cache of names that is just sitting there "parked" is unthinkable to a lot of us.

Going back to my reference above, I have my fair share of mediocre/normal names. It became a game for me to see what I could do with my nonsense names. I could either park them and make pennies or plop them onto a website and do something fun - with the revenue stream to be determined. An example? Try www.bonq.com. It's silly, irreverent, but meets a need for thousands of visitors per month. It doesn't really show up on anyone's radar, Alexa barely acknowledges that it exists, but Google reality-checks Alexa and pays our company
every month an amount that is 1,000 to 10,000 (yes, 10,000) times greater than this domain ever made being parked.

So, do I have parked domains? You bet! But they are there temporarily - a convenient storage device.

Parking to me is like putting meat in the freezer. The magic happens when you take it out and prepare it for your guests.

That is one of the funniest videos on bonq.com that I've seen in a while. I own one of those printers and I think that the guy chose the correct repair tool

Back to seriousness.....we'll a little anyhow.
IMHO you're points are spot on. Ultimately each and every domain should have a natural owner/business that is chugging away earning revenue.

Love the anlogy of the meat in the freezer.

Whizzbang wrote:
That is one of the funniest videos on bonq.com that I've seen in a while. I own one of those printers and I think that the guy chose the correct repair tool

Yes, my shotgun is my best tool sometimes.



Back to seriousness.....we'll a little anyhow.
IMHO you're points are spot on. Ultimately each and every domain should have a natural owner/business that is chugging away earning revenue.

Love the anlogy of the meat in the freezer.

You bet. I know that there are more and more new domainers getting into the business that are acquiring large amounts of domain names - and only generating a few bucks per day via parking. Not sure how they do it - especially since they have to re-up all those names every year.

Having just returned from the TRAFFIC West conference, I have some observations in addition to the already excellent posts in this thread.

It seems that when domainers talk about development, they're talking about buying a domain name and then figuring out what they can put on a web site to create revenue from that domain name. That's one kind of development.

The other kind of development approaches it from another direction: building a business that uses a web site and relevant domain name. The domain name and web site aren't driving the business, the business is driving the domain name/web site. 1-800-Flowers.com is an example of this; the business and the business model predated the domain name/web site but the domain name/web site exploded the business model because of the power of the internet to disseminate information. ANY business that can handle national or international sales has the ability to do this.

My other impression is that as long as domainers are 90% of the market for domain name purchases, buying domain names is purely speculative. But that's another post for another day when I'm more caught up.

Julie,
You bring up some excellent points that I think I'll address in a few articles as I go through my presentations that I made at TRAFFIC.