While many are understandably visibly upset about recent events I think it’s more constructive to consider how to change it. What we need is some obvious regulation on the industry starting with dropped names. ICANN is useless imho as they seem to not have any enforcement power at all. Places like the ICA concern me because they are suppose to be a domainers lobby group but their interest lie with big business instead of average domainers.

Domain drop auction houses like SnapNames and NameJet need to be shut down. I have always considered their “service” to border on criminal and 100% imho unethical. They have been gaming the domain system for years and milking it for millions of dollars. Everything from TM domains to unscrupulous practices and now shill bidding. Feeding off the expired domains is like digging up the dead for organ transplants. Those that previously owned domains never recieve a dime from the millions made from drops. Even if they had the domain for a decade. I see no reason why drop houses should benefit so immensely when a domain is not renewed. The system is flawed. ICANN has done little to nothing to curb the practice. I would deem this similar also to scalping. Drop houses are not registrars and have no place selling domains in the way they do.

I don’t see why anyone even uses their services or why more domainers don’t stand up and cry about the practice being unethical. Oh, that’s right, many domainers have the ethics of a camel. Before you criticize me for that statement realize I been here for many years reading daily the various actions of fellow domainers. The attitude is “just make money” more than anything else. But this might be a reflection of our society more than domaining.

So let’s get back to my statement about being constructive. I have some possible solutions for you to consider.

• 1. All dropped domains sold have to give a percentage to previous whois owner.
• 2. Have a cap on the sale of any domain based on the original registration year. Maybe $100 for each year it was registered as an example.
• 3. Create a regulatory body with enforcement power. ICANN doesn’t seem to have teeth.
• 4. All dropped domain sales are to be sealed bids. This will prevent shill bidding completely as long as it’s regulated well.
• 5. Allow registries (NetSol) more power over drops and auctions.
• 6. Disallow completely the ability to grab drops en masse by any single entity. This would effectively close down existing drop companies.

On the plus side, let’s give some credit to Snapnames for not covering this up and firing the guy before someone external found out.

It made sense especially to the existing base I had at HF. A couple weeks had passed and some crazy antics had occurred. HF was taken down by a defacement and server exploit. Annoyed and rather frustrated I took the site offline for about 3 days. Eventually HF came back to life but not before I recommitted myself to a new forum. Out of that fiasco Support Forums was born.

It’s weeks after launch now and the site is doing very well. I had promoted it on various sites I own and that I am a member of. Currently SF has 1100 members and 19,000 posts. By all standards that’s very good for a 3 week old site.

I hope to continue to see SF grow and that anyone reading this takes the time to give it a visit.

http://www.supportforums.net

Thank you.

I have not found the exact origins of parking or what the very first company was but parking was born from the need of early domainers that were grabbing up hundreds and thousands of dropped domains.  Dropped domains are ones that have expired and while being released into the registry they are picked up very quickly.  The drop market is very lucritive and I will save some of that discussion for another post.

Domainers started to gather hundreds and thousands of domains.  Finding ways to monetize them was a real challenge.  The possibility of maintaining them all as website wasn’t viable.  The idea of letting them sit and not making any money was near sickening.  It was easy to see all the traffic on some domains as people were typing in generic keywords and terms directly into the navigation bar.  So the trick was to minimize effort and maximize profits.  PPC was a growing segment with Google Adsense leading the way. Parking was born.

In it’s essence parking domains is similar to parking your car. You drive it up to the valet and go to the movies while your car just sits around waiting for your return.   A domain owner only needs to create an account at any number of parking companies and then redirect their DNS to them. The rest is normally handled by them.  You do nothing but collect a percentage of revenue.  How much revenue is split from parking company and domain holder varies greatly but some payout as much as 100% (Bodis) and some as low as single digits.

Most professional domainers deep into parking will expend some time into research and finding great keywords or landing pages.  Keywords are the special words they will associate with the advertising.  An example would be superhost.com and using the keyword “hosting“.  This will pull information from a feed.  A feed is provided by the parking companies advertisers based on a number of factors but the set keyword is the main factor.  Now when you view superhost.com you will get ads based on hosting.  They will be relevent results that will attract a click-thru and both parking company and domain owner will get paid.  Somewhere an advertiser has just helped destroy a good domain.

If you have a negative vibe about my attitude with parking you’re right.   I do have serious reservations about the viability and the need for parking pages.  I have concluded that the negative effects of parking are greater than the positives.

First let’s peek at why parking is good.  Domain owners without an ability to develop quickly have a simple and direct method to advertise.   It’s simple and easy.  Parking pages can benefit surfers by redirecting via the ads to relevent results.  Advertisers have an effective method to reach end-users.

But what’s wrong with all that?  The problem is the same as any undeveloped item.  It will never prosper. Domains and the URL system were not created to be monetized in this way.  Surfers are often given a very generic unappealing web page that in-short are just ads.  It’s trickery.  Surfers are unaware they are giving money to the domain owner by clicking what appears to be a link to a relevent page.  Lastly parked domains are often very good domains that if developed would serve the greater good.

This is why parked pages are like billboards on the highway.  They are nothing but ads as you drive on by.  Inherently there is nothing wrong with that but imagine if you will any prime location being used this way.   It is stagnant. It’s ugly.  There is never an opportunity for development to the average joe.  Any highway property is usually worth a great deal.  The most minimal usage for any property is parking or advertising.  Domainers have found a way to do both on the internet. The experience of the internet is greatly diminished by not allowing great keyword domains that obtain amazing traffic to be developed.  Even domainers that park realize development unlocks the greater potential but for the most part but they can’t realize that potential themselves and expect a bounty of sorts to pass on the domain.

We live in a society of capitalists.  There is greed all around us everyday.  The internet for some years felt different. It was a place where the average joe could make a living and start something creative. Now all the good domains are taken and a great portion of them by domainers with no intention of ever developing.  That is a shame.

Parking companies have experienced a decline in recent years as the economy has slipped.  Some are already fearful that parking is near an end as they have minimal leverage with their feed providers to increase revenue for them.  In fact it’s worse than that.  Google is wise enough to know that the lazy parking crowd isn’t going anywhere and they are in a position to have no choice but take cuts in revenue.  Unlike developers that can choose different methods of income the parking domainer has no choices.  Even if moving to different parking companies most use the same feeds.  The only major differences are the landing pages.

There is a sense of a shakedown in the domainer community.  The top echelon of domainers have become rather quiet lately.  Some have stopped blogging completely stating they are short of time and need to focus.  Is there an underlying message that they are losing revenue?  That’s for you to decide.  Next time you visit a parked page.  Don’t click anything except the close browser window button.  Otherwise you’re helping to feed this machine that is threatening to destroy the potential of the internet.

Here was one persons comment:

Think of the web as a big country. Around the country various cities & towns have sprung up. One of the first was the city of COM. Lovely place, one of the oldest cities & people & businesses starting moving in years ago.

As time went on the city started to get pretty crowded especially around the city centre where the first and best houses & commercial premises were leased out. This demand put pressure on supply so that the cost of living and doing business in this dress circle area became higher & higher so people looked for more affordable areas within COM.

Now let’s take one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in the world. MANHATTAN. Anyone from NYC will now agree with me that he is 100% wrong with his analogy.  People can live 30 minutes away and pay a lot less and have more space. Instead they pay the premium to live in the city. The prices in Manhattan have skyrocketed.  Even in today’s market the real estate there fetches a very high premium.

Let’s take another real world example by using historical data on exactly what has happened with the introduction of new TLD’s.

Since the release of every TLD how has CNO actually done? Suprisingly well. I am sure 8 years ago people thought info would take a chunk away. Then came even more extensions. What has changed? Now they want unlimited extensions! So what. There is nothing to indicate COM will falter because of new extensions no matter what the extension is. The only way CNO’s will get hurt if a new method is used instead of URLs.

Here are the only stats I could find at the time of this writing.  If anyone can find better ones please let me know.

http://www.hosterstats.com/

COM Jan 2004 = 25,999,725
NET Jan 2004 = 4,315,306
ORG Jan 2004 = 2,760,196
INFO Jan 2004 = 1,083,688
BIZ Jan 2004 = 912,827

COM Jan 2008 = 71,533,589
NET Jan 2008 = 10,634,627
ORG Jan 2008 = 6,373,060
INFO Jan 2008 = 4,945,475
BIZ Jan 2008 = 1,901,814

Growth Percentages
====================
COM = 275%
NET = 246%
ORG = 230%
INFO = 456%
BIZ = 208%

INFO stats look good except for one thing. The INFO entry cost is extremely low. Also for 4 out of the last 6 months the amount of deletions are greater than the amount of registrations. As you can see on the chart I created that as you extend further away from COM the less percentage of registrations. It’s a nice pyramid imho. We don’t have enough information about MOBI to include it. At these continued rate of increases you should easily see the pattern that COM is going to continue being dominant as it has in the past.

Go ahead and give that page a read then come back to read this article as my response.

I read the article by Duke and it’s fantastic as usual. It highlights perfectly the problems of “domaining” and that is development. Not one word about development from Schwartz. Here is a guy that’s top 10 in our industry. A leader and a showman. Yet in his big speech makes no mention of adding value to domains. As long as guys like that continue to simply park or sell I believe domaining will have a bad reputation.

He mentions a lot about PPC but in reality he is talking about parking. Google won’t kill PPC for sites….but they can easily strangle parking companies. The internet wasn’t built nor has perpetuated based on landing pages to actual legit content sites. Parking companies are just unnecessary middle men that provide a minimal service. They are the pizza delivery boys of the industry. They should not be paid well for their low positions on the ladder of the internet.

While I fully believe domains inherently intrinsic value I do not believe that value should be related to parking PPC. It should be directly related to development potential. Natural traffic is excellent and usable but it’s goal should be content.