The May 2006 issue of Business 2.0 has an article called “Tricking Out Those Parked Domains”.
The article (page 152) is about making parked domain names look more like real web pages. It features Ari Goldberger’s SmartName parking service and quotes PPCIncome’s Howard Hoffman. (Goldberger is a prominent domain name attorney who runs Esqwire.com.) I can’t find the article online yet, but it will likely be syndicated over the next couple weeks.
A quick summary:
“The web overflows with sites full of nothing more than links to advertisers. Howard Hoffman hopes you won’t realize that’s essentially what you’ve landed on when you come across one of his pages…
…But many in the domain game worry that surfers increasingly recoil at static sites littered with ad links, and don’t hang around long enough to execute any of those profit-generating clicks. Moreover, Google and Yahoo try to block ad-bloated sites from showing up in their algorithmic, or “pure, ” search results.”
I believe that as a greater percentage of the web becomes paid parking pages we will start to see “parking page blindness”. This is similar to “banner blindness” of the 90s in which people started ignoring banner ads. That’s why text ads in the standard banner ad size – 468×60 – convert so poorly. Eventually we might find text ad blindness too.
Domain parking companies are responding by juicing up their parking pages to make them look more like web sites. DomainSponsor, which is known for bland but high-converting parking pages, is almost done testing new designs. Sedo, known for it’s very plain parking pages, is about to release SedoPro out of beta. SedoPro allows for greater design elements on parking pages. The ability to customize header graphics is one thing that has made newcomer NameDrive so popular as well.
Look for more on this issue in the coming months…
Leave a Comment