The End of Parking
Well... at least my end of parking :)
My resolution for 2009 is to stop parking all domains that I have, around 600.
I've long said that I dislike parking. With "parking" I mean a service like Sedo's that does not do much more than show Google's domain-contextual ads on customized templates. Showing a page full of nothing besides ads does not provide value to the user. It may be tiny bit better than the stick man and shovel "Under Construction" pages that we saw in 1995, but not much.
My mother will click the ads because she doesn't know that they are ads and because there is nothing else on the page. The parked page is fooling my mother, and I don't like that.
I think everything is better than parking. We will use homegrown tools to automate the creation of pages like this that at least provide rudimentary information and further links about a topic. Google seems to like these basic landing pages better than parked domains as well, which it does not even index. Other sites, we will develop out in a fashion similar to Fyn which takes us days using Drupal and our existing infrastructure.
I realize it's quite easy for me to do make this step as my parking revenue is only low four figures. Nonetheless.
My belief is that domainers can and should do better with the traffic their domains receive. For sure users deserve better. I hope that we will see a lot of innovation in this space in 2009 from companies like Ning or Daylife to make it easier to create community-oriented, content-rich websites on a large scale.
