Google Allows Parked Page Opt-out
2008 is shaping up to be a year of change in the the domaining biz.
First Yahoo! put a stop to arbitrage. Then the Snowe Bill was introduced. Now Google is allowing advertisers to opt-out of having their ads displayed on parked pages.
It’s not hard to imagine that this will soon have, at least in the short term, a negative impact on a large number of people who earn a significant amount of their income from parked domains, but will it all be bad? Certainly there are ways this may improve revenues in the long run, right? We know that well targeted and optimized parked pages can and do out perform some content filled pages. But do advertisers really believe that? That says nothing of major trademark holders who would like nothing more than to shut down even the most ethical of domainer. Will they pull their ads from parked pages even if those ads convert better?
Is there a market specifically for parked page advertising? Or will there be a renaissance in paid inclusion directories instead? If Best Of The Web can make money in a business where DMOZ does for free, why can’t there be a global clearinghouse for domain holders to attract businesses who, if they were able, would buy the domain name outright?
If I own a bicycle shop in Denver I could approach the network with that information, the network in turn tells me that my best bets in the network are DenverBicycles.com, Bicycles.com, Cycling.com, etc. Great, where do I sign up? As a domain owner I’m interfacing with the network to properly categorize/optimize my domains so they can attract the most relevant listings/ads based on semantic relevance.
The problem is reach. Google is the elephant in the room and attracting those businesses is no easy task. But, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and that light is the middle man. All of these businesses, these potential advertisers, need a website. If the network were to partner with top tier hosting providers to offer the customer a straightforward, and dare I dream, inline interface for purchasing these listings? Coming from the hosting industry I can say definitively that the number one reason SMB web hosting customers do not buy into a Google Adwords campaign is because the whole system baffles them. To date there is no provider that has been able to make any managed package deals efficient, affordable or flexible enough to take that confusion away.
It may not be as lucrative (at least at first) as many domain names have been historically, but if the climate in the domain industry continues to be so so rocky it might be worth considering.
