Parked.com, a company that specializes in monetizing – you guessed it – parked domain names, has acquired WhyPark, a 3-year old startup based in Willoughby, OH that provides domain name owners with tools to attract traffic to the web addresses with simple websites as well as tools to manage their portfolio and buy and sell domains on a virtual marketplace. The terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed.
WhyPark essentially allows domain owners to trade in the usual advertisement-filled landing pages that are so common with parking providers for content-driven websites that are supposed to draw organic traffic from search engines (scary line alert: “populate your sites with fresh content daily, without lifting a finger”). WhyPark also allowed users to monetize their sites in a variety of ways, a service that directly competed with Parked.com’s core business.
That means that both companies were in fact rivals to a degree, and that the acquisition means there’s good synergy between them, but at the same time it’s worth noting that Parked.com has always boasted about its exclusive focus on monetizing domain names and steering clear from all other associated services. This obviously is no longer the case now, and with WhyPark becoming part of the 10-year old Parked.com, the combined entity will continue to compete with Sedo (the juggernaut in this space) and the likes.
As Domain Name Wire points out, WhyPark as a result of the acquisition is moving to a free model instead of charging new users a $99 set-up fee like before.
It seems to be a very synergistic acquisition.
I like it.
… whypark.com is not that large, also parked.com has not been in continuous operation for 10 years.
parked.com as a service to domain owners — the owners have parked their domains since tucow did openSRS.
– my over all point — this is a minor story in domain parking.
This is not a minor story to those of us who have hundreds of websites with WhyPark.
We have had no notification of this happening and now must wait to see if these changes will affect us.
A little disappointed in the communication.
But over all it has been an extremely good service.
Seems smart
This is a great move for Parked.com
I wonder where this leaves domainsponsor?
still on top.
Hmm, interesting service, will start using it for my 32 parked domains.
I am not sure I am thrilled about anything concerning parked pages since they do nothing for the user in terms of giving value or having recurring visitors to the parked page.
Until that is solved, the whole parked business will still persist to give domainers who specialize in parking monetization a bad reputation. If it is not useful for the net, then it is not good. Maybe a bunch of links was great back in the 90s with Yahoo Directory type sites.
I own a thousand or so premium properties but havent been focusing on parking monetization. Call me crazy but why give users a bad taste in your mouth everytime they visit your property. The ROI on a developed domain is worth it in the long run. Unless of course you want the quick fix and meaningless templates. Today’s internet consumers are demanding and seriously, parked pages dont cut it.
We will certainly try to avoid this kind of behavior with the launch of .MUSIC. People expect useful content, not junk.
Good business move for the parking companies but not sure if the internet community should be rejoicing about more useful parking pages. Sounds like duplicate content to me and spam. I feel bad for the advertisers who have to deal with paying large amounts of money to parking pages when a lot of their clicks are not “clean”. That is why Google has started its own parking company. Why give feeds to others if you can run the show yourself? I heard its terribly hard to get a Google feed or even a Yahoo feed.
Maybe we can ask the government of Cameroon to let us know how successful wild card redirects to parked pages have worked for them for any type made on .cm.
Regards and keep the internet useful please,
Constantine from Music.us
.MUSIC Domain Name Extension
I agree with you there, in the fact that parked domains provide no real value to the user. But, when you have 1000s of domains, you can only develop so many at a time. Some of those domains might get a decent amount of type in traffic, so parked pages provide a good source of revenue to at least offset the yearly renewal of the domains.
What I hate more than parked pages, however, are pages optimized to get SEO traffic but provide no real value. It seems like the norm now-a-days. At least with parked pages, you can recognize them after a while.
This comment tells me Constantine you have not visited any sites from WhyPark. They do provide value with good content not all like the usual spammy parked pages. They also allow you to do a bit of customizing. Have a good look at this service. This service has allowed me to put up for $1 a piece a suitable little website to monetize my unused domains. Good value I would say.
You are leaving money on the table if you do not have your pages parked with them.
There is parked…. and there is parked. Chalk and cheese here with difference.
Millionairemumma
I’ve never been a fan of WhyPark or Parked for that matter. Donny Simonton over @ Parked was one of the people who was most responsible for domain arbitrage getting out of hand. Parked was basically letting members run wild within their network. I directly blame them for arbitrage being basically shut down. Which who can blame the feed providers, advertisers started complaining about the quality of the traffic. But when you have someone buying traffic at $0.05 PPC and sending it to unrelated domains and ads that are paying $4.00 a click (in hopes that just 2% click on an ad) it’s quite simply click fraud.
I park my domains with another provider and I’ve always been happy. Use standard SEO practices, create landing pages with content and you’ll be able to rank even with a parked page. Having a keyword matching domain is a must, but its not all that difficult. I’ve got a .info domain that’s parked and it ranks (PR2) and it brings in $400+ a month. But it’s loaded with well written original content that is truly helpful.
Look at the sites listed as success stories on the WhyPark site. None of them get traffic. If someone has some examples of some sites that rank (with Compete.com, not Alexa) that are using WhyPark I’d love to know.
I hope they do well, but people shouldn’t think that they can just use RSS feeds and crap content and rank.
Now there is somebody who knows what he is talking about
Cheers!
Mike
The problem with parking sites is that you can’t develop content on them. WhyPark actually lets you do that a little. Domainer, where are you ‘parking’ that lets you build pages? Do you mean ‘hosting’ or do you actually have a parking provider that lets you upload your own site?
Thank you TechCrunch for publicizing and linking to domain parking companies, the scourge of the internet. I die a little bit inside every time I accidentally land on zero-value template sites.
Also thanks to Google for making their existence economical.
This deal must scare a lot of people based on the posts above. Combining the technologies of the 2 companies should lead to many ground breaking synergies…. the competition is nervous.
Right mike?
Parking sucks and to that point when they get mainstream attention its embarrassing. The sad part is that there has been no innovation in the parking world since 2000; maybe except for TrafficZ.
But domainers do own a majority of the web through the premium properties. It just sucks they sit on them versus developing.
Hi,
As the Vice President of Business Development at Whypark since June 2008, my job was advising new feature designs directed to domainers, bringing in large acccounts and communicating our rapid growth and incredible beneficial service to potential partners. I can tell you that everyone at WhyPark and Parked.com are extremely enthusiastic about this synergistic move.
However, I think some of these comments to the news here are suspect.
First of all, some comments are made by competitors who want you to pay lots of money for their services to provide nothing more than what WhyPark can provide for pennies per domain. Great services at affordable prices really drives the bottom feeder “developers” crazy.
WhyPark’s dedication from its inception 3 years ago was to bring quality content to websites that don’t make any revenue from typeins while parked at traditional PS’s, such as Domainsponsor, TZ, Sedo and others. WhyPark NEVER stated that they were direct competitors of parking services… our demographic are domainers who have great generic/brandable domains that don’t receive typeing traffic. Why park your those domains at PPC partners if they get no typeins, no search engine indexing, nor present your domain as a competitive edge for end users? If you are a domainer with more than 300 domains, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Most of us have about 80% of our domains barely making enough revenue through PPC landing pages to renew the domain. But we’re domain flippers, and Whypark sets your domain up quickly to show other monetization opportunities.
Whypark changes your longtail, ccTLD, SLD, gTLDs domains of those “empty results” you see when checking your PPC account management reports. WhyPark does NOT do this with “scraped content” which is what our competitors LOVE to keep pumping into their comments desperately trying to label WhyPark’s success as “temporary”.
WhyPark has a database of over 100,000+ separate articles covering hundreds of niches, and this database grows EVERY day.
The amazing benefits that Parked.com can bring to WhyPark will be felt almost immediately, and at least within 30 days.
Thanks TechCrunch for covering this story. As usual, it shows your website is always on top of the big news, even if some people don’t “want” it to be big.
P.S. If you don’t mind allowing a source for your readers to open up FREE WhyPark accounts and get professional “insider” assistance, I’m posting my full signature here. To show how big a fan I am of WhyPark, I am announcing that my VP position has been eliminated in the acquisition (my duties were completed), but I’m still 100% strong on telling every domainer the benefits of having a WhyPark account for domains they own that are NOT getting typein traffic.
I’ll be the first to state here on TechCrunch that Parked.com and Whypark.com working together in the next year is going to produce revenue generating opportunities that the domain world has never seen before.
cheers!
Stephen Douglas
Successful Domain Management™
Blog: Successclick.com
DomainRelevance.com
“Own Your Competition™”
i am just learning about parking… and I’d like some opinions now that i read this… so…. which site is better? which one should I use- whypark or parked? what are advantages/disad of each, which generates more cash flow… thanks!
(or do they both use same SEO now since they joined…)
For certain products and services, well targeted parking pages serve a purpose to introduce the potential customer searching to one or more providers of that product or service. It’s just a form of advertising. As delineated by Prof. William Lorenz, “Domaineering” is the web-based marketing business of acquiring and monetizing Internet domain names purposely focusing on their use specifically as an advertising medium rather than primarily speculating on domains as intellectual property investments for resale as in domaining where generating advertising revenue is considered more of a bonus while awaiting a sale. In essence, the domain names function as virtual Internet billboards with generic domain names being highly valued for their revenue generating potential derived from attracting Internet traffic hits. Revenue is earned as potential customers view pay per click ( PPC ) ads or the Internet traffic attracted may be redirected to another website. Hence, the domain name itself is the revenue generating asset conveying information beyond just functioning as a typical web address. As the value here is intrinsically in the domain name as an information carrying vehicle and not in a website’s products or services, these domains are developed for advertising, ( i.e, “parked” ), and not into “conventional” websites. As with traditional advertising, domaineering is part art and part science. Often to be the most effective as an advertising tool, the domain names and their corresponding landing pages must be engineered or optimized to produce maximum revenue which may require considerable skill and keen knowledge of search engine optimization ( SEO ) practices, marketing psychology and an understanding of the target market audience, including demographics and buying habits. Domaineering generally utilizes a firm offering domain parking services to provide the sponsored “ad feed” of a word or phrase searched for thus creating a mini-directory populated largely by advertisers paying to promote their products and services under a relevant generic keyword domain. Occasionally content is added to develop a functional mini-website. Ethical domaineers contend that their product, i.e., “domain advertising”, is a bona fide offering of goods or services in and of itself which provides rights to and legitimate interests in the generic domains they use. This serves as a rebuttal or defense in addressing occasional spurious accusations of cybersquatting on trademarks. Domaineers and some of those who advertise online using generic keywords believe domaineering provides a useful, legal and legitimate Internet marketing service while opponents of domaineering decry the practice as increasing the ubiquitous commercialization of the world wide web. Domaineering aka “domain advertising” is practiced by both large organizations which may have registered hundreds or even thousands of domains to individual entrepreneurial minded domaineers who may only own one or a few. This definition of domaineering as a distinct Internet advertising practice is attributed to Canadian Professor William Lorenz.
And you need to stop commenting.
my ass is worth about $20M due to the amount of hot air that I spew each comment.