How a domain parking firm is squeezing extra juice out of domains

Giant Panda adds human element to optimize parked domains.

If you check out the domain parking category on Reglike, you’ll notice that posts are few and far between these days. Domain parking isn’t what it used to be for the majority of domain name investors, and it seems like much of the news I hear regarding parking is bad.

So I was surprised to hear during ICANN the prior week that Google has given out a fresh Adsense for Domains feed to Giant Panda. Over the past decade, I’ve only heard regarding Google taking away feeds, so this is positive news for domain parking.

Giant Panda promises to optimize your parked domains to squeeze more money out of them, but that’s a promise many domain parking firms have made over the years.

So, I tracked down Giant Panda founder Rick Latona at the ICANN meeting in Istanbul the prior week and had him show me exactly how his firm optimizes domains.

There are two levels of optimization. One is automated optimization, and all parking firms claim to do this at some level. It’s hard for me to judge which parking firm has the best automated optimization.

It’s the human optimization side Rick showed me that impressed me.

All domains go through a human optimization process as they get traffic on Giant Panda. Rick showed me the internal optimization platform they use.

Think of it like a ticketing system. Each domain is assigned to a human optimizer. The platform shows them a lot of data regarding the domain, such as where it’s getting its traffic, if the traffic is hitting certain subdomains or directories, etc. It also pulls in data from third-party tools that can be used to optimize.

Of course, keywords are a big part of optimization. But the optimizers can go further, tweaking things such as the color of the page if it’s relevant.

The platform tracks all changes and what happens to revenue following the changes are made. This creates a feedback loop.

There are also managers who review and grade optimization changes, adding a level of quality control.

Overall, I was impressed with what Rick showed me.

Domain parking doesn’t make sense for everyone. But it’s good to see that firms are still innovating in this space…and that Google isn’t giving up on it.