Long time DomainSponsor account manager moves to Domain Holdings.

A well known face (and mustache) in the domain industry is changing jobs.

Jim Grace has left Oversee.net, parent company of DomainSponsor, after over seven years. He will be joining Domain Holdings as Director of Monetization.

Grace will be responsible for growing the company’s Domain Power monetization platform.

Domain Holdings was founded by long time domainer Chad Folkening as well as John Ferber, co-founder of Advertising.com. A number of domain industry employees have landed in its stables over the past year.

Marchex to no longer park domains for customers.

Marchex is officially shutting down its domain parking program for clients.

Wait. What’s that, you say? They have a parking platform?

Yes, but they’ve been in the process of scaling it back since at least 2008. In the first half of 2008 it grossed $5 million in revenues from its parking platform called SiteBox. It anticipated revenues of only $500,000 for the fourth quarter of 2008. I’m not aware of anyone who currently uses them.

The company sent a notice to clients today informing them that the domain parking program will shut down on May 1.

Domain parking company resolves stats issues.

Domain parking company Sedo was hit with a DDOS attack on March 9. This caused a few hours of downtime, and then some difficulties with monetizing “related links” on its parking pages.

Today the company announced that it has fully resolved the problems and compensated publishers. Customer parking daily statistics from for March 9th-19th have been updated. Customers have also been compensated for the three hours of downtime during the DDOS attack.

I’ve heard of parking companies being hit with DDOS attacks, but this one appears to have caused collateral damage with Sedo’s system. It’s good to hear everything is fixed and customers have been compensated.

Retargeted ads increase the relevant ad inventory on parked domains.

Over the past 6-12 months I’ve notice a sharp increase in the number of Google Adsense ads I see that are retargeted. Instead of being related to the topic of the page I’m viewing, the ads are for a site I previously visited.

The same thing is happening with parked domain names. Retargeted ads are starting to pop up on them more and more.

Here’s an example of a parked page I landed on today. The red blocks represent retargeted ads.

(This particular domain is parked with the hosted Google Adsense for Domains program, which is being shut down.)

You can see that four of the ads have nothing to do with the topic of the domain. They’re all targeted to me based on sites I’ve visited in the past.

This will help increase domain parking revenue, especially on domains that have low click values. Why show penny click ads when you can show higher value ads targeted to the user?

But be warned. There’s also a downside to retargeted ads on parked domain names. It makes it easier for trademark holders to complain that ads on your parked domain are infringing their trademarks.

Don’t believe me? Ask the owner of AlamoClub.com.

DevName helps domainers develop their domain names.

Winged Media, the company behind domain auction and expired domain tool ProTrada, has released a new domain development system called DevName.com.

Like many auto-web site developers, DevName takes the theme of your domain name and pulls in related content to create a web site. The company claims to have a superior semantic engine to better target this content. [Update: DevName tells me that, while automatic technology is used for parts of the process, ultimately the sites are put together by a development team.]

An example site is AccidentsLawyers.org.

The service costs $20 per domain per year for a basic site. A site with two unique articles is $50 per year. Publishers can keep the ad revenue their site generates from Adsense and Amazon affiliate accounts.

Winged Media has another domain development service called Parklings.

DevName has also been integrated into the ProTrada interface.