The evolution of domain parking May 19, 2008
Posted by unemployedalcoholic in Domains, advertising, curious finds, internet, technology, trends.Tags: advertising, development, domaining, Domains, evo, fabulous, parking, web development
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More and more advanced domain parking and development platforms have been coming out in the last few months. The bulk of my domain portfolio is currently hosted on Fabulous.com, which is a more conventional service. The landing pages at Fabulous do not really stand out from the crowd, but I love their analytics and in-depth statistical data. I would say that this service is great for managing, analyzing, and fine-tuning large portfolios of names. Parking pages do not seem to differ all that much across these big-name brands, like Fabulous, Parked, NameDrive, ParkingPanel, DomainSponsor, ActiveAudience, etc.
I have been trying out a more forward-looking “parking” service that really develops your domains and adds quality content continuously and automatically, allowing your sites to grow and develop in a very organic manner. It is called Evolanding. So far, I have been very satisfied with the content provided (news articles being aggregated, videos, pictures, job postings), the ads-to-content ratio, steadily increasing search engine traffic, but it looks like they still have a few kinks to work out in their “Dashboard” control panel account view… some of the revenue and traffic stats are a little questionable, and I still can’t figure out how exactly the advertising revenue is split between EVO and their clients. Check out my site VentureDollar.com for an example of how the EVO platform works. You ARE actually allowed to add your own custom content, which I think is pretty cool. The team behind EVO is constantly releasing new features, upgrades, and other add-ons to their service, there’s a blog link that can be reached from their home page.
The story continues…
Today I came across a cute little website called CandyLinks.com I liked how the site was developed, and wanted to find out whether it was a manual or an automated operation. Turns out, it’s a little bit of both. After doing a little digging, I found that the site was generated with a friendly little php app called SteadyNiche. I guess you have to purchase and then install the script for every domain that you own, and though there are up-front costs, you do not have to switch your name servers to any parking service, and ultimately, you maintain full control of what shows up on your web pages. Though it takes a bit more work, you do reap the benefit of keeping all of the revenue that your ads earn (doesn’t look like there are any revenue sharing schemes involved here…), and you can basically call the sites you produce using this tool, true, bona-fide web development and keep your conscience clear. What’s parking? What’s development? The lines may soon begin to blur…
Disclosures (sort of): Though I use the services mentioned in this post, I am not affiliated with the owners of the parent companies, and I tried to keep this review-like post as objective as possible. Act on my feedback and ideas at your own risk, my experience may be unrepresentative and different from that of others who use these services. If something goes wrong, DON’T BLAME ME! I would, however, appreciate your own feedback and recommendations for other parking and domain development platforms. I think that diversification is generally a good thing. That includes having a diverse domain portfolio, as well as different ways of managing it… then again, to each his own. What works for one may doom another.
Happy domaining!
I too am currently using a variety of agencies to park my domains. I currently use TRAFFICz, EVOLanding, and SedoPro. I am monitoring quality of resulting content, how they affect domains stats, domain management interface, and resulting revenue.
I feel EVOLanding unquestionably has the best resulting content, Trafficz seems to have the best customer control and versatility with their new domain management interface, and at this point they also have been reasonable on revenue generation. I have only been with SedoPro for a week or so and it is new and still in development, so evaluation between all the platforms on revenue generation and management system is still in process.
I will probably have a number of domains parked at Fabulous.com in the near future, and will add them into my evaluation stack.
I am not an expert, but I do know what I like… We will see on in the future…
Thanks for the comment. In most people’s minds, there is a very fine line between parking and development. However, advances such as the EVO platform begin to really blur that boundary. The content delivered is EXTREMELY relevant and on-topic, and with the good SEO work by the EVO team, their sites may easily beat out other, perhaps more “genuinely developed” sites in rankings.
Frank Schilling contends that the content delivered by his PPC sites is useful content, in fact he does use the word “content” when talking about the ads he runs. Of course, my revenue stream is nothing compared to what he has going as I entered this business a bit late, but I would beg to differ on his ads = content assumption…
Consider, for a moment, the domain name annarborrestaurants.com which is operated by Frank’s Name Administration. Now, I live in Ann Arbor, and I am sure that anyone who would ever enter that string of words into their browser address bar is very clear about wanting information on Ann Arbor restaurants. The “content” presented, however, is not at all relevant to this topic. The page has links to “Chefs,” “Catering,” and “Restaurant Equipment” in the main body of the page, and everything from Real Estate, to Hotels, to the University of Michigan listed under “Related Links”, but not a SINGLE name or ADDRESS of an ANN ARBOR RESTAURANT is provided.
Hopefully, the EVO platform is a step in the right direction…