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.

Relaunching fxd.com

After a sale of $15,000 for the domain fxd.com fell through (buyer disappeared), we decided to keep it and relaunch the FXD forex forum using vBulletin. The previous forum on the domain was getting a little bit of activity already so it will be interesting to see how it continues to grow.

The investment for a forum is tiny (vBulletin $180, vbSeo $149, some content maybe $500, some SEM maybe another $500). A forum may be a good way to add visibility and traffic to an obscure letter combination such as fxd. We'll see how it works out.

Launching Denmark.net

A couple of years ago, I've been introduced to the world of domains through a former client of mine. Three years ago I started to invest in domains and a few related businesses.

In the next years, (among many other things) I would like to grow our business in the area of geo domains.

We have had initial success with a German language country portal for Slovakia (Slowakei.com) that now has 120,000 unique visitors per month.

Today, we are launching Denmark.net. I bought this name on November 1st, without realizing that my offices are in the same building as the Danish embassy in Bratislava. We also have around 50 supporting names such as Fyn.com and Langeland.com (two Danish islands).

In only 50 days, the team created a country portal based on Drupal with community features such as blogs, photos, and videos, and a categorized directory of 220,000 Danish businesses.

We will do more similar projects in 2009. Looking forward to an exciting year!

New blog

Almost exactly 10 years ago I launched my first real website, HtmlWizard.net.

Let's see what we can come up with today.