Saturday, August 30, 2008

Parked domains, Monetizing traffic

I was studying the revenue report from my 9 domains at TrafficClub (now called domainsponsor which is part of the moniker roll-up). I learned some things.

The nine domains have been there for years. One has made money (getting close to $200), two have made less than five dollars and six have made zero.

The one that has made money has been there for years. It made all of its money this year, primarily in the last four months. The actual sequence is:

June - $24.21
July - $63.34
Aug - $82.32
2008 YTD - $248.81 (of which $169.87 was in last 3 months, so $78.84 was in first 5 months)

The breakdown of revenue by category is interesting. $.08 from pop-under revenue but$83.20 from search. There were 65 visitors and 45 clicks on advertisements and 26 searches.

So, the site made more than $1 per visitor! (This is also true in July) And, while there is no revenue breakdown from search versus advertisements, there are two days in which there are only searches and on both, there is zero revenue on those days (confirmed by looking at July) so I can conclude the money is coming from onsite advertisements.

Previous posts on this topic:
There's no such thing as free lunch with domain parking - Sept 2006
Parking domains at GoDaddy - Last week
Parking domains for money - Guess which one is making $$$ - Last week.


Since I have dozens of idle domains, I'm busy parking lots of them.
And I have questions:
- what is the best parking service? I have a few at TrafficClub, a lot at GoDaddy's cash parking and I just set up an account at NameDrive.
- is it a total hit or miss business? Do I have any influence or way to predict which domains are going to make money or not? Is my parked domain making $80 in a month a total freak?
- is it worthwhile to add my own links from my other domains and blogs?
- is it more sensible to just look at the keywords that they're optimizing for and then do a few pages of my own with adsense and some similiar content?
- what percent of the total revenue is my parking service paying out to me?

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