The Domain Parking Game Has Changed

When I stared thinking about building StakeWeb

I saw what few others were talking about - the domain parking industry was stagnant and boring, offering little value to most domain investors. And I was just dumb enough to go and open my big mouth and start forming opinions about it.

Old landing pages. The same model everywhere. Exorbitant fees.

I realized that type-in traffic was gone, which is what had killed the industry, and that was the insight (at least it was the first one…) that led to StakeWeb.

Well, 2 months ago Google announced a big change to the way their ads will work and which pages they’ll be displayed on. Targeting specifically - you guessed it - parked domains…

It turns out I’m not dumb, I’m a genius who can see the future…

This is major confirmation of StakeWeb’s foundational premise; type-in traffic is all but dead, the old model won’t work any more, and it’s time for something new.

What does this mean? It means parking is going to be changed forever.

Okay but what does it really mean?

Right now the vast majority of parking providers are using Google ads as their advertising partner. When you go to a website that’s parked, you see “relevant” ads that are served from Google to a widget the parking host put on the page.

When those ads are clicked, you as the domain owner (but mostly the parking provider) get a small payment.

Google is taking away those ads now.

So when I said it was a big change…I meant It was an earth-shattering, industry-defining change that radically altered the domain parking industry.

Yeah.

Domain Parking is now a long-term game.

I said this earlier and I wanted to get back to it because it’s very important; domain parking is facing a radical transformation.

Until now, the focus has been on capturing direct traffic - users who typed a domain name into their browser's address bar - and monetizing it with “relevant” pay-per-click ads.

But with modern search engine algorithms, type-in traffic has all-but evaporated unless you have an established brand or an exact-match keyword name.

Existing parking solutions do nothing to offset this lost traffic, and so the entire industry has fallen to the wayside.

Few newer domain investors consider parking but they should. Here’s why:

If you sell 2% of your portfolio every year, assuming 0 replacement with new names, after 10 years you’ve still got over 75% of your names. After 20 years, still over 2/3 of your names are left!

Which also means you’ve paid 20x the renewal cost on all the domains you held for those 20 years.

Parking can offset that loss. And it may even add money to your bottom line. As I wrote in my last post, a single parked site can bring in hundreds of dollars a month.

What does it look like with real numbers?

2000 names. After 20 years you have 1360~ left.

You’ve spent close to $275,000 over that 20 years paying for just those names (that didn’t even sell!).

Even if you sold names for an average of $2000 each (and made ~1.2 million dollars or $50k a year), that’s 21% of your sales!

That’s not to mention “dropping” names.

But setting that aside for another post, think about this:

If you had 20 names (1%) of your portfolio earning just $100 a month in parking, the resulting income would completely offset the parking fees for the entire portfolio!

That’s to say nothing of the fact that those names would easily sell at a premium, potentially far beyond the “undeveloped” price.

All this to say, it’s an exciting time to be building a company focusing on monetization for domain investors now. If you want to learn more about domain parking or get started today head on over to StakeWeb.com and as always we’re happy to take any questions!