Leonard Holmes of ParkQuick reports on a domain company shutting down.
A major domain parking company just announced that it is closing its doors. ParkingDots will be no more effective March 9th.
In the last issue of Name Monetizer I reported that ParkingDots had lost its Yahoo feed. They were unable to obtain another “tier 1” feed, and today announced that they are shutting their doors for good. If you have domains parked there, you should move then right away. You may want to try one of our currently recommended services:
ParkingDots paid 80% of the revenue that they received from Yahoo. This was great for domainers, but maybe there is a reason that others don’t pay at that rate. Landing pages from ParkingDots didn’t quite keep up with those from the industry leaders. I don’t know why Yahoo dropped them, but I did detect some nervousness from the industry leaders when I interviewed them last month. This may not be last parking company to close its doors this year. The announcement from ParkingDots read in part:
Hello. You were recently informed of the end of our Yahoo feed for your parked domains, and the subsequent contract we expected to sign with another Tier One feed provider. Unfortunately, the arrangement with the alternate provider did not work out as we’d expected. The consequence of this is that ParkingDots will be closing our doors effective this Sunday, March 9, 2008 at midnight. All the domains you have pointed to us should be redirected immediately to an alternate parking company…. Any monies owed you will be paid according to our normal payment schedule, approximately 45 days following months end.
The site also included the following stats:
Yesterday’s Hits Total 63K
Top Hits (1 Day) 2K
Month Average 82K
If these stats are accurate, then a lot of you may need to do some quick nameserver changes on your domains. I’m starting right now.
(Thanks for the space, Andrew)
Leonard Holmes
ParkQuick.com
Nice report, Leonard. ParkingDots was owned by Banks.com, I believe. They’ve had a rough year. I think their IRS.com site is coming under fire from the government. I saw them doing arbitrage with the IRS.com the other day.
Yes – they were Walnut Ventures (The one with the hyphen) but changes the name for the main company. I heard that the government wanted to take their IRS.com domain – which should not be allowed! They are publicly traded with ticker symbol BNX, currently 95 cents a share.
@ Parkquick – yes, I heard that too about the IRS. I know that Banks has a ‘legal letter of opinion’ from their lawyers that basically says government organizations aren’t allowed to own .coms, which should protect them. However, the government can change their mind at any time, and Snowe’s bill would certainly make owning this domain a problem. Given that they paid around $10 million for it, that would sting.