The Perfect Parked Domain Name
Monday, May 18th, 2009
Domain name brings value to advertisers — and money in my pocket.
A couple months ago I bought a generic expired domain name related to summer camps. It doesn’t get much traffic. But on May 5th my preliminary traffic report at my parking company showed the domain got 21 clicks from one visitor. I assumed it was a bot, but when the stats were finalized it turns out the visitor was legit and generated $12.11 in revenue for me.
I went to look at the domain name and it became apparent why this visitor generated so much revenue. The landing page was a one-click lander, meaning it had ads directly on the first page the visitor saw. Every single ad was for a particular summer camp. And thanks to geo-targeting technology, some of those ads were for camps in the vicinity of the visitor. The parked page basically acted as a directory of summer camps for the visitor.
Month-to-date this domain officially has an RPM of $507.81. But all of the clicks and revenue came from just 2 of the 32 visitors. Over the weekend another visitor stopped by, clicked on multiple ads, and deposited $4.14 into my account.
This clearly isn’t a story about getting rich from a domain name. It has earned less than $20 this month. But it shows how the right generic domain and well targeted ads can add value to visitors — and the domain owner.
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Tags: Domain Parking
Interesting comments, especially to those of us who daily trawl the drop lists for just such domains…
But “well tarted ads”, now that’s a concept (or maybe a typo?!)
@ Marg – that’s the type of ad you write about when your 2-year-old daughter is home sick with you
It’s fixed.
one IP clicking 21 times is not a ‘perfect domain,’ it’s a ‘perfect fraud.’
I think I explained why it makes sense in this case. If you’re looking for a summer camp, and you’re presented with a list of summer camps, it’s highly likely that you’ll click on many, many of the links.
It’s telling that Google and others such as Media Post’s Search Insider are embracing the value of location. This could well be the answer to the decline in contextual PPC.
Looking at it this way I guess having a domain name parked is a good thing. I never really run into them unless I submitting articles and come across and old domain.
regardless of intent or the real truth of what happened, I’m surprised they didn’t just scrub the multiple clicks form the same IP anyway. Which SE was this revenue generated on . .. my bet is yahoo.
I’m surprised the “development crowd” hasn’t chimed in and told you how your rpm would be so much higher if you just developed
it also tells me the domain is on yahoo, because google would filter that IP sooner rather than later. Bots like to jump on a page and hammer it with clicks. might want to check the referrer to make sure you didnt buy a domain linked into a click farm.