Sedo bolstering US presence - Sedo is sending its founder to its U.S. office to help the company attack the North American market. Sedo founder and CEO Tim Schumacher is relocating from Europe to Boston to help the company increase its presence in North America. Sedo established itself as the king of domains in Europe and is viewed similarly in the US, although there’s a lot more domain aftermarket competition in the US, where Afternic and GoDaddy’s TDNAM have a share of the market. The ... read more ...

Survey: NameDrive tip Domain Parking Service - Newcomer NameDrive took top honors in the 2006 Domain Name Wire Survey. [Editors note: this is the fifth in a series of posts with results from the 2006 Domain Name Wire survey. The complete results of the survey will be posted soon.] NameDrive took 14% of the vote for the most popular domain parking service, edging out top players like Sedo and DomainSponsor. NameDrive has a great user interface, a number of attractive pay-per-click templates, and almost instantaneous ... read more ...

Survey: Domain Parking Driving Market - 65% of domain name owners anticipate receiving more income from current advertising than domain sales. [Editors note: this is the fourth in a series of posts with results from the 2006 Domain Name Wire survey. The complete results of the survey will be posted soon.] What’s driving the increase in domain name values? Current revenue from domain names is more important that resale value right now—or so says the typical domain investor. 65% of domain name ... read more ...

The $18 click and some-more from TrafficClub - Another month, more great results from the TrafficClub parking program. My RPM at TrafficClub held steady this month, buoyed by one click for over $18. I’ve had some high dollar clicks before, but nothing like that. The funny thing is the domain that got the click was one that hadn’t received more that a few page views since I registered it about 9 months ago. I probably would have let it expire had it not been for the click – which just paid for 3 years ... read more ...

Follow a Money - Domain names are only a small part of the internet money trail. A large number of domainers are active in the market because they want to strike it rich (OK, just about all of us). This is especially true after the coverage in Business 2.0 last month that gave a simple “how to” explanation of domain parking. Alas, it’s not as simple as buying some random domain names and setting up parking pages. You won’t be able to quit your day job doing that! Since ... read more ...

midPhase ups storage space for webhosting - My favorite web host, midPhase, has increased its storage allotment. As the owner of over 500 domain names and more than 50 web sites, I require a dependable web host. Domain name owners need webhosting that allows for unlimited domain names to be hosted for the same price. This allows domainers to create a number of mini sites that monetize quickly–without setting up an expensive hosting account for each domain. Domainers also need great support. A while back ... read more ...

Sedo surpasses 3 million domain listings - Domain sales and parking company Sedo announced that it now has over 3 million sales listings. Sedo went live in 1999 and has grown quickly by anyone’s standards. It helped put international domain name sales on the map. In fact, the first domain ever sold by the company was tulpen.de (tulips in German) for 300 EUR. But it also records some of the highest .com sales in the industry. I recall the first time I visited Sedo. At that point it seemed like “just ... read more ...

Do images boost parking page click-throughs? - Communicate.com has added preview images to its parked domain pages in an effort to increase click-throughs. Communicate.com (CMNN.com) owns a number of premier domain names including Perfume.com, Importers.com, Body.com, Boxing.com, and more. It develops some of its domains into ecommerce stores and parks its unused domains to generate ad revenue. The company has changed its parked page templates to include a screenshot preview of each ad’s target page. For ... read more ...

Monetizing Domains with AdSense - Do you want to start off the new year with a new approach? Are you concerned about the honesty of the third party pay-per-click services? It’s possible to go directly to Google and use their AdSense program to finance you domains. While many domain professionals use domain parking services, others prefer to develop their domains into full-fledged websites. Once this is done, then programs such as Google’s AdSense can be used to monetize the domain. The rules ... read more ...

TrafficClub Dec Results - The final month of 2005 was another good month for PPC earnings at TrafficClub. If you are a frequent reader of Domain Name Wire you know that I’m a fan of the TrafficClub.com paid parking service. Here are my results from December 2005: -Overall revenue per 1,000 visitors (RPM) : $31.26. This is down from $44.41 in November, but this is due to adding some domains with high traffic and low click-through rates. -Domain Sponsor generic lander RPM: $25.41 -Domain ... read more ...

Interland to change name to Web.com - Following the acquisition of Web.com and its assets by webhosting company Interland, the company announced that it will change its name and web presence to Web.com. Web.com is one of the best possible domain names for a number of uses, in particular webhosting. But I suspect part of this move is to change the company’s image. As one of the earlier “big” webhosts, Interland had its share of rocky experiences. I used Interland’s services for some of my first ... read more ...

Will Dec 26 be large for domain name owners? - It’s been a great year for domain name owners, and it’s not over yet! Owners of consumer-related domain names that use parking services have seen lots of traffic in December. More and more consumers are going to the web to buy holiday gifts and are landing on parked pages. But the shipping deadlines for most consumer web sites have now passed and traffic to consumer domains is slowing to a drip in the last couple days leading up to Christmas. (The exception ... read more ...

2006 Domain Name Survey update - 272 people have participated in Domain Name Wire’s 2006 Domain Name Survey. There’s still time to participate! I invite you to click here to take the survey. The survey covers a number of topics and will help forecast the direction of the domain name market in the coming year. Among the topics covered are: -What’s the most important feature of a good domain registrar? -Which domain parking service is best? -What is the best venue to sell domain names? -Do ... read more ...

Google competence clamp down on typo-squatting - The writing is on the wall for domain name typo-squatters who register domains and then park them on Google or Google-fed programs. An article in this week’s eWeek talks about Microsoft research of typo-squatting and how Google hasn’t done much to prevent typo domains from landing on its Adsense for Domains sites. This isn’t news to anyone in the industry, but increased spotlight will force Google to make changes. An article in the press isn’t a big issue. ... read more ...

NameDrive Domain Parking - I’ve had a chance to give paid domain parking service NameDrive a thorough testing and I now feel comfortable endorsing it. I received my first payout this month. Ad Feed: NameDrive uses Google Adsense ads to monetize your domain traffic. Design: I like the choice of templates and simple page design. An example of a site parked at NameDrive is Alakazham.net. You also have a choice of one-click and two-click landing pages. Payments: Sent monthly via PayPal ... read more ...

Do shorter ads get some-more clicks? - One of the driving forces behind increased interest in domain names is pay-per-click advertising. Pay-per-click listings are the number one revenue source for domain parking services such as DomainSponsor. GoTo, which later became Overture and now Yahoo! Search Marketing, pioneered the pay-per-click industry. But Google quickly dominated with its Adwords program. A key difference between Yahoo and Google was the length of ads. Google ads have a short 25 word title ... read more ...

The $6.45 Click - Domain name investors hope to earn a return on domains in a couple major ways. First, we hope to get domain parking revenue. But let’s face it. We really just want to get this revenue while we wait for someone to offer top dollar for the domain. Many of my domains earn enough in parking revenue each year to pay for the renewal fee. Some earn much more, but most earn less than the renewal fee. This doesn’t discourage me from parking these low traffic domains. ... read more ...

Boosting Google Adsense on Domain Names - Many domain name owners go beyond simply parking their domains with companies like DomainSponsor. They create mini sites of content related to the domain name and add Google Adsense ads to the pages. For example, see my CankerSores.com site. As a parked page it wasn’t getting traction in search engines and made minimal revenue, so I created a small site with Adsense ads. It now earns more money than as a simple parked page (I’ve had sites start earning 10x ... read more ...

Traffic Club Nov Results, Skenzo - Frequent readers of Domain Name Wire know that I park most of my domains at TrafficClub. TrafficClub optimizes your domains across a number of different parking services. Most traffic to date has been delivered to either Domain Sponsor or Google Adsense for Domains. TrafficClub just added Skenzo to the mix. Skenzo is unique by offering more than just pay-per-click ads. They provide pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, and affiliate ads. They have attractive landing ... read more ...

Domain Hacks - A focus on so-called “domain hacks” grew when social bookmarking site del.icio.us starting gaining international attention. The actual domain for the site is http://icio.us, but del is a subdomain. It’s a neat way to make a word out of an otherwise indeterminable domain. Creating domain hacks can be fun but may create security issues. Will it ever amount to a brandable domain? Doubtful. Every time I try to go to the Delicious site I end up typing some ... read more ...

Will new Google calm bids impact domain parking revenue? - JenSense (a great blog for contextual advertising information) just pointed out that Google is now offering separate bids for search and content ads in its Adwords program. This is similar to Yahoo/Overture, which lets you set different bid amounts for an ad that results from a search and a contextual ad on a web site. Most people find Adwords contextual advertising to have a much lower ROI than search advertising–even with Google’s “smart pricing“. What ... read more ...