[edit] or Wiki it below .....

Parked Domain Monetization is the business of purchasing domains and running advertising on a landing page to earn ad revenue from traffic. The traffic to these domains comes from a variety of sources : old bookmarks, people typing in the domain ie "direct navigation", residual traffic from the previous web site or search engine results.

Domain tasting - Because there is a 5 day grace period which for returning and receiving a refund on a domain, registrants are utilizing this to register domains, test them for traffic and keep the domains which are monetizable. This approach has the potential to be particularly lucrative and low risk because these businesses can test the residual traffic of a domain name before paying for it. In addition, the registrant can benefit from any residual income from the traffic received during the five day period even if the domain is refunded.

According to a November 17, 2005 Wall Street Journal article, "revenue from text ads on these sites will total $400 million to $600 million world-wide this year and may reach $1 billion by 2007, according to Susquehanna Financial Group analysts Marianne Wolk and Roxane Previty, who track the online ad industry."

Google is one of the preferred methods of converting this traffic into ad revenue and they have a special service for domain parking. (Google AdSense for domains). According to the site, "AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related keywords and advertisements to parked domain name pages by using Google's semantic technology to 'understand' the meaning of each domain name. Powering over 3 million domain names, AdSense for domains is the industry's leading parked page service."

One question is the role of these "professional registrants" in the community. Do they hurt "user registrants" and their ability to receive domain names that they would like? Another question is whether registrars should be limited in their ability to participate in this business.

[edit] Questions from Joichi Ito and others

(Please answer these questions as well as you can)

• What is the definition of a "parked" page ?

Any domain that monetizes its traffic using paid listings from an ad network. The traffic may come from users typing in the domain into a browser (called "direct navigation", "type-in" or "organic" traffic), or it may come from links from other websites. "Parked" names are becoming indistingushable from other names. Probably a "parked" name would not contain any other content besides ads, but that is becoming less and less prevelant. The parked domain registrant is incented to provide content (and yes ads) relevant to what the user visiting the site is looking for.

Examples:

auctions.com is a good example of a parked page with content. Google is not a parked page

digitalcameras.com

kicksforless.com

I let the domain fungible.info expire (it was fungible). Here's what it looks like now: Parked fungible.info image (Wendy Seltzer)

• What percentage of the various TLDs are controlled / owned by professionals registrants?

• Are registrars involved directly or indirectly in the Parked Domain Monetization business and if so in what way?

Registrars, ICANN and Registries are all invloved indirectly in the Parked Domain Monetization business. The growth in the zone files is mostly due to the increasing number of registrations due to the increase in PPC and all these entities benefit by that growth. Registrars participate by providing "transfer fulfilment", "drop catching", and "ad syndication" services.

In addition, registrars participate in the Domain Monetization business by retaining ownership of domains that are not renewed. Similar in concept to the "domain tasting" done by "professional registrants", Registrars point soon-to-expired domains to a parked page and thereby can guage the "value" of the domains that are expiring soon. The domains therefore never delete, but are taken over and renewed by the registrar. Registrars also use domain monetization for "parking" customer domains. Godaddy is an example. Registrants at Godaddy are given a parked page. It's quite obvious that this side of the business is likely much more profitable than the miniscule margins that domains registrations receive. Seemingly a major conflict of interest, virtually all the major registrars monetize names on some level and many have utilized the loopholes to acquire more traffic through retaining expiring names for themselves.

• Who represents the user registrant at ICANN?

Simple answer... ICANN has an elected board member to represent individual stakeholders. Whoops. No they don't.

haha... but seriously, the board really should not be representing a particular constituent - we need an SO like ALAC to somehow represent the voice of these individuals I think. --Joi 19:27, 27 Mar 2006 (EST)

• What is the stress on the system caused by the "domain tasting" process?

If by "system" you mean the Verisign (.com and .net) registry system, then the answer is relativly speaking, very little. "domain tasting" (or some call it "ad/deletes") provides much less stress than an activity such as "drop catching" because with "drop catching" the registrar performs probably many thousands of registrations attempts for each successful registration, but with "domain tasting" each attempt results in a successful registration. The registry is sized for "drop catching" therefore, the addinitional stress caused by "domain tasting" is slight.

The burden shifts towards:

* intellectual property concerns (Hopefully, the trend of "domain tasting" will   avoid registrations of terms that contain trademarks.)
* services that track registrations en-masse, such as but not limited to Data Escrow services or anti-phishing/anti-spam services.   
* data portals such as whois.sc, uwhois.net and iwhois.com

• Who is a "user registrant" ? Can we define this or is it subjective ?

Its probably subjective, but if you define that you probably should define "user" (i.e. the person who visits websites). I suppose you wish to segregate registrants into two types 1) user registrants and 2) professional registrants, but what about plane-ole DNS users? Are certain type of registrants second-class citizens? Which user is ICANN more about: registrants or users (people who navigate to websites)? Taking out spamming, cyber squatters, phishers, etc, are there "good" and "bad" registrants?

• Does the registry ie Verisign have rights to monetize traffic ala Site Finder services?

Check the proposed contract. I think sitefinder (a wildcard DNS record) is specifically ruled out there.

I don't know what the contract says, but Verisign should not have the right to re-instate Site Finder. They will push for it, but ICANN has a responsibility to the Internet community to push back and insist that Versign's cope is only for the operation of the registry. --gemsling

This question gets to the heart of what is really going on with the 7% price increase proposed in the ICANN/Verisign settlement. During the litigation, most of the monetizable name space which returns more than $6 has been registered by the domain-tasters. If Verisign turned on Sitefinder today, the revenue would be less than it was two years ago because most of the low-hanging fruit has been harvested. By ratcheting up the domain price incrementally each year, then Verisign has a built-in mechanism to "get back" the now-registered namespace that is being monetized by others for marginal returns across large domain portfolios. -- jberryhill

• Now that there is obviously more money involved than Verisign thought possible what other angles will they take to route this to their coffers ?

Sounds like a biased question Now that there is obviously more [PPC] money involved than Google thought possible what other angles will they take to route this to their coffers?

[edit] Resources for further information

ParkQuick.com covers domain parking and compares various parking companies.

A good place to start to understand "domainers" - the workers in this cottage industry of folks who mine the veins of organic traffic - is in what has become the de facto trade journal: DNJournal.

Another good place to learn about this industry are the TRAFFIC Conference and Domain Roundtable conferences: http://targetedtraffic.com/ and domainroundtable.com.

For those unfamiliar with the Direct Navigation Market, the definition and a brief description of it can be found at http://www.directnavigationmarket.com

There are also blogs reporting on news and other interesting happenings in this industry.

• Domain Editorial
• Domaining Blog

Parking Companies:

• DomainSponsor
• Sedo
• Parked.com
• RevenueDirect
• Parketeer
• WhyPark

[edit] A little bit about one of our ICANNWiki Sponsors

NeuLevel CompanyLocation Founded to meet the new technical and operational challenges of the communications industry when the U.S. government mandated local number portability in 1996, NeuStar has evolved to create customer-responsive technologies that deliver a broad range of essential clearinghouse capabilities for service providers. Our clearinghouse enables delivery of traditional services more efficiently and deployment of new services more rapidly than ever before. Today, NeuStar is an essential component of the operations of service providers globally. No matter what segment of communications you're in, we can help your company significantly reduce costs, speed up time to market for new services and grow your business in lasting ways. Our clearinghouse services enable customers to manage critical activities such as record exchanges, subscriber growth, network optimization, content management, and inter-network call origination and termination. We have also designed our automated solutions to evolve in response to the rigors of tomorrow's communications services - including VoIP, wireless data, and law enforcement compliance.