Domain Name Parking Note for August 2007
Summer doldrums are ending; are your domains ready for Fall traffic?
Ah, summer. The weather is warm, the beaches packed, the kids out of school, and families on vacation. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Not if you count on internet traffic for a living. August is historically a poor month for domain name parking. But school is back in session at the end of this month and traffic will increase again. Take this downtime to make sure your domains are optimize and ready for more traffic.
Here are updates for popular parking services:
Parked continues to perform well. I’m running just shy of a $100 RPM for this month. The firm just released a fresh feature for uploading custom graphics, which I explained the prior week.
DomainSponsor recently disclosed that it will have a “one click” lander by the end of the year, in which ads are positioned on the initial landing page. The firm is also supplementing its primary ad feeds with advertisements from its own network, which provides it notable independence from big ad firms like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO). My highest traffic domain at DomainSponsor has a $408 RPM, which skews my overall number. But suffice it to say that DomainSponsor remains one of the most popular parking firms for a reason.
TrafficClub is still only showing ads from Skenzo, but plans are in the works for more ad feeds. Skenzo isn’t delivering very relevant pictures on many of my domains, which is likely hurting overall click-through rates.
NameDrive’s Park & Sell program is in full swing. The firm hosted “Park & Sell” Poker at Domain Roundtable. The poker chips had domains and earnings listed on them. The winner of each game won three domains by selecting chips.
Sedo’s SedoPro domains continue to be picked up in search engines. I’m not seeing many clicks on those domains in search engines, but it’s traffic I wouldn’t otherwise get. The design of the landing pages, counting a paragraph of text regarding the subject, certainly helps from a search engine standpoint.
Dotzup, the G-rated parking platform, continues to perform well with quality landing pages. I’m earning regarding $50 RPM there, although my portfolio at Dotzup is limited.
TrafficZ hosted a wild party at Domain Roundtable in Seattle, and proceeds went directly to Grassroots.org. TrafficZ and DomainTools are giving away a 90% revenue share for Q4 of this year at TrafficZ parking and a one year free Gold Membership to DomainTools for an entire firm to anyone that donates $5,000 to GrassRoots.
