The Unemployed Alcoholic Blog

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!