Is it me or is everyone else stupid?

A much maligned topic is the one about domain parking and its shelf life.

Its an intricate subject and one that is multi faceted. For a start i think its important to state a very simple fact. No one in the global village that is “the net” likes parked domains. Not even the domain owners themselves. To the common or garden web user they are ugly, contribute nothing and simply serve as an arbitrage vehicle to get web users to a site they were probably looking for in the first place. “Hey, surely simply by being this vehicle this contributes ‘value’?” I hear you say. Well, thats debatable. Would web users get to the site they required if they got a 404 error page instead of a parked domain? Also debatable. Would web users be better off without parked domains? Almost certainly. However, they do exist and unfortunately (for all the puritan advertisers that believe they are nothing but the anti-christ) they own the traffic. Nothing google can do about it, nothing Yahoo, ICANN or whomever else that dreams of their demise can do. And traffic, aside from unique content as Google would have you believe, is the real King. Users type in an incorrect address, an incorrect spelling or, more likely, a correct address into their address bar and a parked domain is the result.

So where next?

Ok. Lets take it as a given that Google and Yahoo fed parking intermediaries are unlikely to kill the cash cow. Why? Because if they no longer wanted this traffic somebody else will. Google have been great recently at sending out mixed messages about the subject. On the negative side, the head of Google’s AFD program (that which deals with domain parking) told me that not only did he expect a consolidation in the parking intermediary market, he also expected the others that remained to have either gone out of business or to lose their contract to supply the much sought after Google feed. He also said Google had stopped taking any new parking companies in the fall of 2006. Google and Yahoo also do not have anyone fronting their respective domain channels. read into that what you will. On the positive (if you can call it that) Google have just said, very un-Google like, that “about 60 percent of sales from our content campaigns come from the domain pages.” What a nuisance it must be for them… On the one hand they are shouting “die you swines, die” and on the other they are quietly touting the success of the domain channel.

The punch…

What next? Well, for domains that do not get type in traffic, I can seriously see these domains being phased out from being able to receive any feed at all. Google has already taken up the baton of policing this now, which should have been (and was always intended to have been) the responsibility of the domain parking company, and have been systematically banning individual domains and domain owners from receiving their sub-syndicated feed. Knowing Google, i’m pretty sure that as soon as they have weeded out all the bad domains and click fraud scammers who do the rounds, they will begin to asses the non-fraudulent domains and begin excluding these based on the likelihood of the domain receiving any natural / type in traffic. Currently, those new to the domaining arena trade and buy up the scraps that are left (90% of which have no chance of a genuine visitor). They then seek to either drive visitors to their parked site by either paid ad links or through some so called SEO “mini-site” technique which involves writing or cribbing text onto their parked page in order to achieve organic visitors from the search engines. Does this add value to the space? Not much. But certainly more value than that of a simple parked domain. However, and here’s the crunch, the value these “mini sites” bring in terms of dollar revenue to Google is minuscule and so therefore they can go.

End Game

The end game is most likely to result in just a fraction of undeveloped domains being allowed to be parked using a Google or Yahoo PPC feed. These “chosen” remaining domains will no doubt see revenue multiples increase substantially when the advertisers realize the space has been cleaned up and its therefore safe to return. For the rest, they will either be forced into dumping the domains back onto the open market or do the unheard thing that is “develop”. My guess is most will dump.

An outside bet.

Some domain parking companies seemed to have realized that the end is nigh and are creating semi-automated sites from parked domains. The most notable, iMODO.com actually produces sites that are better than a lot of custom made sites. Do they add any value by syndicating contextual content from elsewhere? The jury’s still out on that one. But, whatever the weather, companies such as iMODO are in a race to obtain traction before the plug is finally pulled on domains such as isitmeoriseveryoneelsestupid.com.