No, the title is not a typo. And no – I don’t like domain parking pages[1]. I actually hate them. Unless you make $$’s from parked domains, you probably hate them too. I especially hate how they’re taking over more and more of the natural search engine results, and reducing their quality to absolute rubbish.
So how in the world can the despicable domain parking business be of any value to the web?!
Here’s how –
Domain parkers make $$’s in two ways: 1) They catch web traffic (usually from search engines or typing of mispelled URL’s) to their domains and monetize the hell out of it using Google AdSense or Yahoo’s YPN, and 2) they buy and sell these domains.
It’s #1 that I hate, and #2 that I think is such a critical service to the web community. A lot of companies buy domains these days, but very few sell them. Once a corporate decision is made to buy a bunch of domains for future use, those domains are usually gone from the market forever even if the owner never does actually use them. That’s just the nature of stuff like this in big/medium companies – no one really cares about unused domains, and just the thought of getting consensus and sign-off on selling a domain is daunting.
Domain parkers, on the other hand, keep the domain inventory liquid. That’s what enables many new web companies to establish brands and actually own a decent domain name. Without domain parkers, a majority of the domains would be snatched by faceless corporations “just to be safe” and never ever see the light of real use ever again.
I wish we could get #2 (liquidity in the market) without #1 (spamming of search engines), but I guess that’s the price we all have to pay for this service. I just hope that Matt Cutts & Co at the search engines will find ways to push these shitty pages far down the result list…
[1] No link love in this post… if you don’t know what domain parking is, Washington Post recently had a good article on this subject.
[update: just noticed that Forbes had an article on the subject of parked domains a couple of days ago. via Dan Grossman]