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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Re:This comment parked

There has to be a way to neutralize these sites as the Internet is getting more useless every day. Legitimate people who try to register a site find their name is taken by someone just sitting on it and demanding $50,000 for the name. Here's a dangerous idea: cancel the domain registrations. Make a few simple rules, like any entity found to have more than 10 mobius loop sites like this will have all their registrations released and name servers de-listed (which would kill the ISP). We could get the Internet back in one afternoon. The dangerous part is that someone will need to decide what qualifies and what doesn't.

Re:This comment parked

Woahh, woah, hang on. Where the hell do you live, Africa? This is a ridiculous argument. You almost certainly make enough money to fund a measly $50/yr for your TLD. If it's not worth even that much to you, you should be asking yourself whether you even need it and considering getting a subdomain from a hosting provider or something; you can probably get them for free somewhere. I totally reject your argument.

One can only hope.

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.

Re:One can only hope.

We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.

Given that the real source of traffic for these sites has nothing to do with search engines (it comes from people typing stuff directly into the location bar of the browser), I doubt that that would be productive.

Re:One can only hope.

Actually, that's wrong. Earlier last year I launched a new website and a corresponding AdWords campaign to spread the word. When searching the name of my product, I get hundreds of hits from parked domains that are running AdSense containing my ad on it. Now, the first five pages of results are legitimate websites, and the remaining 10-15 are parked domains. It is incredible how many empty domains get drawn into these search results.

Furthermore, most people search for websites rather than type them in the location bar because they usually don't know exactly what they're looking for. If parked domains only made their earnings from direct hits, I suspect it would not be nearly as profitable.

Re:One can only hope.

Furthermore, most people [who know how to use the internet] search for websites rather than type them in the location bar because they usually don't know exactly what they're looking for.

I corrected your comment for you. I have seen numerous people who don't really understand what a web browser is who try to type what you and I would call search queries into the address bar. Parked domains and phishing sites target those users who simply don't know any better. Beyond that, there are parked domains with names similar to every single popular website on the internet. I seem to remember Craigslist.com being a porn site. The other day I was looking for "Curse Gaming" to download some WoW addons and sure enough, cursedgaming.net, cursegaming.net, cursedgaming.com, etc. all came up with webpages. Luckily Google is smart enough and by searching for "Cursed Gaming" I got "Curse Gaming" which is what I needed. Oddly enough, all those subtle iterations on the domain don't show up as results on Google.

Re:One can only hope.

Actually, I find it's often the opposite. People who DON'T know how to use the Internet search for web sites rather than typing them into the address bar. I don't know how many times I've had a conversation similar to this one:

Me: OK, go to www.dimspace.com
Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.
Me: No, just type it into the location bar.
Them: What? I'll search for it here. OK, which one is it? Should I click on the top link.
Me: (resigned) Yeah, I guess... (mumble something underneath my breath about how cousins should not be allowed to marry)

People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com" and stare blankly at that over-crowded page searching for the "mail" link. As Ross Perot used to say, it's just sad.

Re:One can only hope.

I know how to use the net. Heck, I was surfing with Lynx just last night. Anyway, I have largely stopped typing the name directly to url bar because every now and then, I make a typo. The search box is right up there by the url bar on all gui browsers anyway.

Re:One can only hope.

People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com"

Hahahahahaaaa. I run into that type of person quite frequently too. The young, ditzy, personal assistants often seem to fall into that category. "I went to the link you told me to go to and it isn't working. You know, www.mail....." , "No, LISTEN you stupid bitch! There is no fucking WWW." .... Sorry, had a flashback there.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

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/ [kona.com] - Hawian island.
http://www.konabikes.com/ [konabikes.com] - parked, knows Kona are a cycle manufacturer and hosts loads on links, but none to Kona's site.
http://www.konacycles.com/ [konacycles.com] - parked with adsense links of no specific type.

Turns out its http://www.konaworld.com/ [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.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

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.

Re:One can only hope.

We clearly need to work harder on our new users.

Re:Mozilla did it right

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.

Re:One can only hope.

Or remove the advertising incentives. They only make money because companies like Google and Yahoo pay them. To me, that's no different than the "aggregator" sites that are just links and news about asbestos.

AsbesDot

News for Asbestos. Stuff that matters.

Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

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.

Re:One can only hope.

I don't think it's the search engines that cause the visits so much; rarely, if ever, do I click a link from search results and get a parked domain. If I do, it's usually because the search engine has it indexed before, and the site has since been taken down and the domain bought by someone else.

The way that domain parkers make their money is mainly through mistakes. For instance, if I buy reallykickasssite.com for a future project, a domain parker is going to come in and register reallykickasssite.net, reallykickasssite.org, and reallykickasssite.info in the hopes that my site will become popular and someone will accidentally type in the wrong TLD. Then there are ones that are mispellings, like foogle.com or yahooo.net or something.

Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

What's worse, though, is that they hold on to these forever, so you can't just wait for their registration to expire. A domain is fairly cheap, so it's not a huge drain on them. And I know of no way to purchase it from them, either. If you have some sort of trademark or copyright, you could probably wrestle it from them through lawyers, but beyond that you're likely SOL.

I've learned my lesson, though. If I ever get an idea for a domain, and check to see if it's open, I'm going to buy that domain if it is. It's only $8-$10, and if I decide I don't want it I just turn off auto-renew.

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have a sneaking suspicion that they are the ones doing the parking themselves (that's where I do most of my domain checks), and just trying to get another $10 out of you for the domain.

Re:One can only hope.

Try this article, http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03 /how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain/ [mikeindustries.com] from Mike Davidson (of Newsvine) on how he grabbed the Newsvine.com domain.

Re:One can only hope.

I've read numerous articles that state that GoDaddy does register domains and park them, as you said. They make tons of money off of this, because they can then sell you the backorder service. For this reason, I have stopped using GoDaddy to search for available domain names. I use tucows domain search, or r4l.com and search there, then later register it on GoDaddy when I'm sure I want said domain.

Getting a Dropped Name-

is a bit harder than you may realize

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work?

I have all my domains registered there and there was one that was expiring and ready to "drop" and I wanted it, so I registered to try to get it with GoDaddy.
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.

Re:One can only hope.

Assuming that:
a) parked domains with advertisements/portals are detectable
b) list of these sites could be easily kept up to date
c) something that I haven't though of could be used to quickly determine if a domain was parked

Then it would be a trivial plugin to rewrite common typos, and avoid these sites entirely. We can push the advertising somewhere else!

Parking?

His idea kind of reminds me of the pages you get when you misspell an URL.

Does this mean i will get spiffy Web 2.0 pages when i do that now?

"Web 2.0 Sprinkle"?!

FTFA:

If you can make that much doing nothing, what if we added some Web 2.0 sprinkle...

I've now found a great metaphor for all this "Web 2.0" nonsense: urine.

Web 2.0 is people pissing on the Internet!

Quite a bold article...

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

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.

Re:The change

Fun Fact: All loops eventually end where they started, not just Möbius loops!

gah

all of that emphasis is hurting my eyes!

www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

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!!

www.XFmq1yw1pC3.com
www.QtEQpK1jGnm.com
www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com
www.bbyja3OWEVW.com
www.iQ7aE0YSTl8.com
www.tV56pze3idd.com

and i've got all the .biz, .info, .org etc too. so don't think you can steal my idea!

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

> www.tV56pze3idd.com

Hey, how did you find out my password? :)

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

I'm going to grab all of the mispellings of those then. Just wait until I get pay-per-click $ for "www.XDmq1yw1pC3.com".

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

Prepare to feel the wrath of InterNIC's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy.

Yours faithfully,

Mr. QtEQpK1jGnm

If it's real, then it's temporary

'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'

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.)

There is no market economics in this

'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'

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.

A friend of mine does this. There is no market economics involved because domain names are monopolies. If you own a domain name, nobody else does. If someone wishes to advertise on it, they have to pay your terms for it. If someone wishes to buy it, they have to pay whatever price you set for it. It's actually a lot like real estate, except most of the land got bought up by a few hundred individuals when the price was $10 a lot.

Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.

Do that and you 1) kill off most of the web, 2) make multi-millionaires out of whoever runs DNS. Everything relies on DNS.

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.

Domain registrars are in a similar business. They offer to make trivial changes in a database for you for an annual fee. Increasing the registration fees just transfers money from the parkers/squatters to the registrars. Increasing the fees registrars pay just transfers money to Network Solutions.

Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.

The amounts sponsoring sites pay per click will depend on how many sales they get per click. It has nothing to do with whether or not the domain is being parked/squatted.

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.)

Like I said, there is no market economics in this. It's a side effect of the artificial (but necessary) monopoly created with the concept that a person or corporation can "own" a domain name. The only way to avoid it would be for a central authority or government agency to go through domain-name-space and regularly "clean up" any domains that were obviously just being parked for clickthroughs.

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.

Not such a bad business..

    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.

stupid headline, stupid article

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".

Re:stupid headline, stupid article

It's not really squatting, though, is it? In real estate, squatting means living on property that you don't own, without the owner's knowledge/consent, because the property is effectively abandoned and neglected.

This is more like real estate speculation. Buying a parcel of land, and then sitting on it to assert ownership rights, while not developing it and waiting along for someone who wants to buy it from you so that they can use it. Speculating is a lot less unsavory-sounding than squatting.

Translation

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.

It keeps getting worse, too.

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.

What's In a Name?

Domain names are an artifically scarce commodity. Extra toplevel domains like ".biz", ".xxx" etc (".etc"?) don't really help, as most people can't remember the toplevel extension to the domain name they remember, assuming it's ".com" and going (googling) from there, unless tricked astray.

The real solution is to move from misleadingly narrow UR L s, locators of the precise info resource, to the UR N s, names like "Nabisco" means "biscuits" in the real world. Trademark means competing suppliers of the same product/service can't use the same name, but has not been well implemented to guide Internet consumers.

The closest we've got is googling for a name. Which isn't bad, especially since Google itself has competition (though its name has ironically become generic for "Internet search"). Wikipedia's disambiguation techniques seem effective, but probably haven't been tested by the kind of system games swindlers attack the wide-open Net with.

Google does evil

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.

BS

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.

real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

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.

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.

Re:BS

No, the problem is that Google enables these people to make a return on their "investment". If you buy some land in the hopes of selling it at a premium about all you can do is something constructive with it while you are waiting.

Instead, what Google has enabled is to turn this wasteland into a money-making opportunity for these folks. Take away the ability to put ads in this space and it will dry up overnight.

Re:Google does evil

This is hardly a Google problem. It's ICANN, and specifically Verisign for selling huge numbers of domains so cheaply, and making it so very difficult for a legitimate user to protect themselves or recover from a domain squatter. They also deliberately leave it very awkward to track the domains back to the squatters, making blacklists or automatic filters quite difficult to construct or keep up to date.