Will Domain Parking survive?

Will Domain Parking survive?

Will domain parking survive long-term?  

Well that’s the question I am asking myself over and over these days.

Why so?  

Because I have seen parking revenues, especially RPM tumble across almost all categories of domains since April of 2007. In addition, I read domainers across all forums and blogs complaining about declining parking revenues all the time. More and more domainers complain about falling parking income every month.  

Being a domainer myself for more than 10 years and remembering how domain parking used to be the domainers’ mecca, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that domain parking has some kind of serious problems affecting it.  

Many domainers think it’s the domain parking companies that are paying them less and less these days. Its the first thought that come to mind, isn’t it? But I would hesitate to blame just the parking companies alone. I have dealt myself with few parking companies over the years. I know there is cut-throat competition among parking companies to get our business. Parking companies have nothing to gain if they keep losing your business to a competitor.  

So that begs the questions: What the hell is then wrong with domain parking? Why does parking income keep falling?  

Well, one probable cause is that two major domain parking feed providers are the search engines yahoo and google. Both of these are publically traded companies and every quarter they must meet their projected revenues or “Earnings Per Share” estimates from analysts. If they don’t meet or exceed their EPS estimates, then their stock price falls. So it may be possible that one quick way to help meet the ever increasing EPS estimates is to cut the parking or publisher revenues by lowering the click rates or RPC. The other reasons for ppc fall may also include click fraud and advertisers opting out of domain channel.

So will domain parking industry survive long-term?  

The answer is not clear…..may be or may be not, especially if parking companies keep their current business models of ‘just parking’ the domains with “existing traffic”.  

Domain parking will definitely survive if it changes with changing times.  Many domainers have already started moving away from traditional parking in to mini-development or as they say it mini-web-sites development. Domainers are also increasingly moving their domains with existing traffic away from parking fearing that pure parking is making them lose return visitors to those domains. All this is putting additional pressure on parking companies to maintain their business. We also tried our hands on development by learning word-press. We just recently launched our first blog site CreditReportBlog.com and it was a fun but challenge to learn and see things unfold. Now we are launching our dream project that I always wanted to see developed: DNBlogger.com  

Some parking companies are already starting to change their parking pages or business models. Good examples are parked.com and bodis.com that are now providing parking pages where you can customize by adding your own content, and affiliate links etc. Domainers should also be able to add local/direct advertising links either themselves or via the parking company.  

It is just the beginning in my opinion, the tide is turning, domain parking companies are evolving in to mini-development platforms with built in seo (search engine optimization). It is only a matter of time before parking the way we know it today, will be a thing of the past and parking companies will compete to proudly call themselves domain development platforms.  

So what do you think: Will domain parking stay alive or will be dead in the long-term?

Let me know your thoughts.