Goldkey, ActiveAudience, and SmartName offerings to be reviewed.
Frequent readers of Domain Name Wire may wonder why I don’t often mention any of Name Media’s domain name parking services. It’s nothing personal; I’ve just never explored their services. So today kicks off a series of reviews of the company’s parking services.
Name Media, parent company of BuyDomains and Afternic, offers four services: Goldkey, Active Audience, SmartName and SmartName Classic. Generally speaking, Goldkey was designed for newbie domainers and those without big portfolios, moving up to Active Audience in the middle tier, all the way up to SmartName, which was designed for pros. Both Goldkey and SmartName were acquired by Name Media.
If you use house parking at Afternic, then you are familiar with Active Audience, which currently monetizes those domains.
My reviews of these services will not consider their RPMs, as it would be difficult to park a substantial number of domains with each service and test them for at least 30 days (the minimum required to get a fair read on revenue). Instead, I will use one generic domain, FruitCobbler.com, and test it across all four services. I’ll compare how flexible the services are compared to competitors and each other, as well as how well they auto-optimize the domain.
For reviews of other parking services, please see Domain Name Wire’s August parking report.
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