GoDaddy has opened up its domain parking service to the public — but charges a fee to participate.
GoDaddy has long been one of the internet’s biggest domain parking companies, but it has limited its parking pages to domains registered through its company and not put to use. GoDaddy didn’t share its parking revenue. A while back it started offering revenue share to its resellers. If someone registered a domain through a reseller and didn’t put it to use, GoDaddy would install a parking page and share the revenue with the reseller.
Now GoDaddy has decided to get involved in the fast growing parking business by offering its parking platform to all domainers. But here’s the rub — GoDaddy charges a fee to use its parking service. At first this seems like bad business. But GoDaddy has long made a practice of going after the lowest common denominator in domain names. It is likely targeting people who register domains and aren’t aware of the ability to park domains for free (and get paid) at other services like Sedo and DomainSponsor.
GoDaddy charges $2.99 per month to participate in its domain parking. At this level it shares 50% of its parking income with the user. It’s unclear what GoDaddy’s revenue split is with the ad network, but given its size it’s probably a good split.
GoDaddy is also trying to capture larger domain parkers with revenue shares of up to 80%, but you have to pay more to get into these tiers. To get 80% of revenue you have to pay $39.99 per month. It your domains earn $500 per month in parking revenue, paying the $39.99 makes sense: $500*.8=$400 minus $39.99 fee = $360. If you are on the basic plan you would have earned $500*.5=$250 minus $2.99 fee = $247.
But I still don’t understand why anyone would pay a fee to participate. If you are earning $500 or more a month you can likely get a high revenue share from other domain services. Unless GoDaddy has stellar conversion and a higher revenue share with the ad network it just doesn’t make sense.
Additionally, GoDaddy’s parking pages are nothing to write home about. See an example here.
If anyone tries out GoDaddy’s service, please post your results here.
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