There’s been a lot of buzz around alternative forms of domain monetization, alternatives to domain parking. Here’s my take on it…

I think quite a few of the ideas circulating around at the moment are sort of dead end. One thing that is pretty overhyped overall I think is development (sorry to say). Domainers are not developers, developing is a defocus for them and they don’t know how to do it properly in most cases. What is the point of spending a week building a website about sharks or octopuses that ends up making $2 on ad-sense a month? Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in building out prime generic domains especially in an e-commerce/lead generation/cpa context, doing SEO, arbitraging the site via PPC etc. I just don’t believe in taking 1000 domains and producing mass content, it’s really only about tricking Google for a little while who will eventually kill it because it’s really about just littering his search index. The only fit for domain mass development is for domains that don’t get type-in traffic. Why would you want to own domains without type-in traffic anyway? Rule number 1 – always follow the traffic. If you stick to this mantra, you get the domain game. If you don’t, I guess you’re condemned to flipping domains on dnforum for $20.

Since developing is such a complex issue, let’s focus on ways of alternative monetization for type in traffic. These are the areas I think are the way to go forward and make sense, some of them overlap:

  • Zero click – The whole idea of this is not sending a visitor to a parked page but directly to an advertiser for a fixed fee for every redirect, similar to PPC for advertisers
  • CPA/Lead Generation – I am very strong believer in this model. I think that about 20% of traffic now going to parked pages can be monetized better via CPA/Lead gen. Could even be 30%. This year I plan to take this route and arbitrage significantly more domain traffic to CPA. I want to build a small department in my company entirely focused on this. Problem with CPA is that it is very time consuming, involves a lot of testing and is difficult to scale. I think I have a solution for this though, I will elaborate more in coming weeks.
  • CPM Ads – I think this could be a very decent ad on to parking. Why not put banners or more aggressive display formats on parked pages for advertisers more focused on selling their brand. There is huge money in display advertising and this area has really been ignored by the domain industry. Say you have a domain making $10 rpm. Why not put a banner on top of the parked page making another $5 rpm on top?
  • Email/list building – Another area still completely ignored by the domain industry. Say you have a domain like PersonalLoans.com (still paying my debts to Frank). Why not put on it a email submission box entitling subscribers to get hot loan deals once in a while. This could be an interesting avenue for creating another continuous source of revenue from your domains. Email marketing is seriously a huge business.

Just my few cents…

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