Parked Domain Monetization

Verizon Communications has been awarded $33.2 million in a lawsuit (NYT article, WSJ article)  charging OnlineNic with trademark infringement and cybersquatting. Verizon claimed that OnlineNic registered hundreds of domains (example: myverizonwireless.com, iphoneverizonplans.com, and verizon-cellular.com) with the intent of deceiving online consumers.

In a somewhat surprising announcement today, Google opened its doors to the “little guy” domainers who want to monetize domains with Adsense directly. Google’s previous product, Adsense for Domains, was available exclusively to organizations/individuals with huge volumes of traffic. With this latest move, Google effectively lowers the bar to any domain owner with an Adsense account to park and monetize their domains with Google.

The domain and search industry is still trying to figure out if this is a good or a bad thing.  Google provides advertising for many of the domain parking service companies and this move is seen as a bypass of those middle men on the part of Google. Andrew at Domain Name Wire thinks the shift is toward monopolization and believes the general revenue for domain parkers will go down, while others believe Google will pass on more of the profits directly to domain owners. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, Verisign released a Third Quarter Domain Name Industry Brief that showed third quarter 2008 registrations up 19% over last year during the same period but the growth rate overall is slowing. Andrew Allemann at domainnamewire.com thinks part of the tld registration growth slowdown is due to Google Adsense tightening its policy regarding parked domain site advertising. AdWords advertisers can choose to opt-out of showing ads on parked sites, making the investments in domains less attractive if your primary monetization strategy is parking.

Companies with trademarked names can begin to register .tel domains during the sunrise registration period that starts tomorrow. The new .tel domains are designed to allow businesses to store and publish their contact details within the supporting DNS system. The information will the be available to any Internet-connected device. The domains become a link for businesses and individuals to provide constantly updated phone, email, and web addresses. Danielle Belopotosky, at The New York Times, has just written a great summary article about this new development.

Owning domain names that cover niche subject areas on the web is something most people can grasp the value of. However, it’s normally a two-step process to make money with niche name domains.

First, you have to figure out names that make sense to people. For example, if “green duck eggs” all of a sudden became the world’s most popular food, you would think owning greenduckeggs.com would be a good thing. If it’s popular enough, you might make money just by selling the name to someone with enough interested in owning it.

In the majority of cases, that’s not going to happen. Normally, the second step required to monetize your niche domain is that you need to publish content and ads.. There are lots of domain parking services that will create instant websites enabling the domain owners to monetize them. However, most of these sites will never reach their full potential because there is no “value-based” content for web visitors. They mostly contain subject links and ads.

There are more and more companies now that promise to create a value-based website that will cause visitors to return repeatedly. The lastet of these is a company called Domain Embarking. They claim to create “Real & Relevant” web sites based on a keyword you submit that is highly associated with your domain.