Parking Pages on 404 Pages — GoDaddy Tests

GoDaddy tries monetizing error pages with parked pages, but will discontinue practice.

GoDaddy is concluding a test in which it ran parked domain name ads on error pages of its clients free hosting accounts. The tests were limited and only showed the ads on non-existent pages of sites that used GoDaddy’s free, ad-supported service.

Interestingly, the ads were not part of GoDaddy’s feed but instead a full landing page served by DomainSponsor.

In the example below, the error page has GoDaddy’s standard ads at the top, followed by an error message and then a complete DomainSponsor landing page at the bottom:

A GoDaddy spokesperson provided the following explanation to Reglike:

Go Daddy has some hosted Web sites using ad placement on 404 pages. This applies only to specific, free ad-supported hosting accounts. This was a test we conducted and are phasing it out.

I’m somewhat surprised this was allowed, given that Google (ad network for DomainSponsor) clearly buckets parked page traffic. Although Google does offer error page feeds, these are typically provided to ISPs and computer firms to serve landing pages on non-existent domain names. Perhaps this doesn’t matter since parked pages also serve up ads on non existent URLs, such as domainname.com/something.

DomainSponsor representatives were not available for comment at the time of writing.

Thanks Elliot for the tip.