Domain parking – earning easy money with unused domains

Domain parking offers website owners the chance to earn money with tem­por­ar­ily unused domains, balancing out the costs of hosting in the process. In the website business you often find in­di­vidu­al domains that aren’t needed for a certain amount of time. An unused domain still has to be paid for, and domain parking may provide an al­tern­at­ive to selling it. You have to decide between monetary and non-monetary parking. A simple note such as ‘website under con­struc­tion’ is suf­fi­cient and lets the internet user know that the desired page content isn’t available at the moment. Many domain owners go one step further and fill dormant websites with ad­vert­ise­ments in order to generate income.

High-quality domains are a precious commodity. Many website owners decide to continue operating expired web project domains until a suitable buyer is found. There are many factors that determine the market value of a domain, such as the domain name as well as the top-level domain (TLD). Other factors that play a role include tone, mem­or­ab­il­ity, and concision. Popular TLDs such as .com or .net are more valuable than less common endings such as .biz or .org. It is crucial for the domain to contain industry-relevant keywords. If the domain is easily mis­spelled, this also has a negative impact on its value. Other factors that need to be con­sidered include:

• The backlink profile
• The search engine ranking
• Existing eval­u­ations

A short BBC doc­u­ment­ary explains how domain traders, also referred to as “domainers”, can make hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pounds from buying and selling domains. In this video, find out how some of these en­tre­pren­eurs got involved in this big money­mak­ing business.

The business model of domain parking is based on matching landing pages with ad­vert­ising to unused domains. The content of a pro­mo­tion­al offer on dormant websites is them­at­ic­ally selected as a second-level domain. Links are supplied by a spe­cial­ised parking provider that relies on an ad­vert­ise­ment pool of different web partners like Yahoo! and Google. If an ad­vert­ising link is clicked on by a visitor, the company with the placed ad com­pensates the parking provider on a pay-per-click basis. The revenue, which the parked domains receive through clicks, is divvied up between the domain owner, the domain parking provider, and the relevant ad­vert­ising partner of the parking provider.

Those looking to park a domain will find a variety of com­mer­cial providers that let you place permanent texts or ad­vert­ising campaigns on your dormant website. A domain sale can usually be processed through your service provider. Al­tern­at­ively, some internet provider’s offer domain parking services. There are two options regarding providers:

• Pro­fes­sion­al domain parking provider: the option of parking a tem­por­ar­ily-unneeded domain is a basic component of the domain business. Popular domain parking providers in the UK include Bodis, Voodoo, Do­main­Spon­sor, Skenzo, and Afternic. Depending on the domain parking provider, there are many design pos­sib­il­it­ies (varying in flex­ib­il­ity) available for the landing page and domain parking templates. In order to generate a higher click rate, domain parking providers define a keyword in the style of the domain name. This allows links to be spe­cific­ally tailored to the parked domain's visitors and intended in­form­a­tion (or products).

• Domain parking via the provider: Some internet service providers, which provide a domain re­gis­tra­tion service as re­gis­trars, offer their customers an un­com­plic­ated domain parking service. Instead of co-operating with ad­vert­ising partners, these companies often take care of their own ad­vert­ising. With this set-up, customers that allow their domain to be ad­vert­ised on are com­pensated through com­mis­sion. The parked domain can be re­act­iv­ated anytime in case it is needed again.

The un­der­belly of domain parking is known as ‘cy­ber­squat­ting’. This involves re­gis­ter­ing a domain using someone else’s brand with the intent of profiting from it by selling it to the rightful owner. ‘Ty­po­squat­ting’ (also known as ‘URL hijacking’) involves re­gis­ter­ing domains that contain typos with financial gain in mind. Mis­spelled domain names and domains that are similar to existing brand names are often misused as parked domains, and owners profit by picking up some of the web traffic of company sites, online stores, or in­form­a­tion portals. Selling over­priced brand name domains and typo domains to the relevant rights holders is another example of such misuse.