This parked domain makes $900 a month

It’s a solid (not chart-topping) sale, but this recent sale demonstrates perfectly both the pros and cons of domain parking.

So what’s the domain?

I’ll get right to it -

vinos.es

Now maybe you’re saying “oh Wines in Spain… of COURSE it’s earning $900 a month…”

Well, hold on there. Most parked pages, including parked pages about wine, earn $0 a month, because they’re on sales landers. Because parking revenue is entirely dependent on traffic to the site, and many domains get no organic traffic, it’s “just not worth it”.

So that’s the first thing in domain parking. It’s really the first thing in domain investing;

The name is everything

Different industries, businesses, and names will perform differently. If you own an exact match term, the context can matter.

Consider this domain; vinos .es vs, the English wines .es; the words receive roughly the same amount of monthly traffic in Spain (presumably where the domain would be best-suited to operate), but the Spanish word has over 10x the revenue.

So clearly the local language search makes a meaningful difference in parking revenue.

Okay okay we get it - the name matters. What else?

Traffic matters

Having a great name matters but a great name with no traffic (is that even possible?) won’t earn anything until it sells.

In this case, the website gets 1350 monthly average visits - over 15,000 a year!

And fortunately in this case, we have some conversion numbers. RPM (revenue per mille (per thousand)) is a common domain industry metric for parking revenue. In this case, RPM is $681, or on average each visitor makes the site 68 cents.

It’s hard to find good data on this subject but an average RPM I’ve seen floating around is $50 (across an entire platform, including the 0 traffic sites). So this is far better than average.

Obviously this is explained again because of the strength of the domain.

The right monetization strategy brings it all together

So what’s the story on this domain?

Right now, there’s an advertisement that the new owner is crowdfunding the development of the new site:

I have no fear they’ll be able to make their money back quickly.

Let’s compare what we know about the model we had (parking) and what could be. Dream with me a bit.

Known Model:
1350 visits
$920 in revenue
$681 RPM

Actually sell wine in Spain:
1350 type-in visits
some % of 27000 monthly web searches (60%? 30%?)
some % of 22000 monthly web searches (10? 5%?)

Let’s assume the lower end of those numbers (30% and 5%) and that comes out to about 9000 search visits (if the site gets built and ranks, which it will because of the name).

Assuming the same RPM, same model, this would equate to over $6000 a month!

At a 20% net margin on that business, the extra eyeballs will return about $1200 a month. At 80% net margin, it’s closer to $5000!

That doesn’t account for increases in conversion, increases in search volume or share of clicked results, and increases in RPM from a different model.

You just have to build the business (and spend $12,000 to buy the domain)

This is the con of parking - the revenue is usually going to be a lot worse than a well-executed business actually using the domain.

Wrapping it up

I think the last thing I want to point out is that this site was parked for at least 16 months based on the wayback machine. Assuming it earned that much the entire time, the domain owner didn’t just hypothetically make $12,000 from the sale of the name at auction (presumably dropped?), they made $10,896 on top of that in parking revenue.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the conclusion that parking revenue often increases the value of a domain. For a few reasons, but in this case, because it gives you a reasonable expectation that your revenue will continue into the future, which helps you turn down offers that aren’t some multiple of that price.

By the way, are you like me and wondering what the parked site look like?

I’ll let you judge:

I think this just goes to show it’s not just the fact that you monetize domains, it’s how you monetize them, that can make a significant difference in your total returns. The name itself matters, but so does the traffic, and what you do with it.

And that’s ultimately the problem we’re solving at stakeweb.com - helping domain investors monetize their unused and unsold domains.