In my early domaining days I was simply pointing my domains to a web form for visitors with an interest in purchasing, to leave their contact information. This went on for several years and I can easily say I lost several thousand dollars this way. In 2004 I shyly started using the parking service of Sedo.com, slowly adding more names until my account was upgraded to Sedo Pro.
Now, I sometimes have the reputation of an outspoken guy in online forums. That’s true; I will stick to my guns until the battle smoke clears up, but I always strive to be objective and accurate to the circumstances surrounding my point of view.
Sedo’s services and interface have substantially improved over the past four years. They offer a variety of templates with a customizable image and the editing is quick. There are some drawbacks that I should mention first – just to get them out of my system.
- Sedo does not support meta tags, such as description and keywords. It really hurts a domain in the long run, especially one that competes in Google for term relevancy. Sedo made a statement that Google asked them to do that and I simply cannot believe this statement.
- Adding domains is easy as long as the WHOIS info matches that of the account. For the most part, it works well. Sometimes, especially on a Friday afternoon, the domains will be delayed and added to the account the following Monday. Unless that Monday is a public holiday in the US, the UK or Germany.
- Changing the domain keyword is a pain; it takes up to 3 days for that to happen as they are manually approved.
- Google feed. Sometimes payments are extremely low, sometimes they are decent. Fluctuation has earned Sedo the term “yo-yo revenue”.
In mid-2007 I started using Parked.com right at a time that their feature list exploded: Custom templates, full-featured meta tag customization, addition of custom content including images & video. The guys at Parked.com really listen to what domainers need. Did I mention that their keyword parser – the code that splits a domain name into intelligible words – has no close competitor? I fed it the domain NATIONWIDEMORTGAGELICENSINGSYSTEMANDREGISTRY.COM and it properly split it into “Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System And Registry“. By the way, this is my longest domain and it does get type-ins.
Parked.com has some negatives, so I will list them here:
- Yahoo feed seems a bit sketchy after they implemented the “TQ” factor, some oddball quotient that pretends to judge the quality of traffic, awarding accordingly more or less money per click. I branded “TQ” as “Thieving Quotient” and it’s one Yahoo feature I clearly dislike.
- Template flavors seem to alternate unpredictably between single-click and two-click; the former awarding more money per click than the latter.
- Downtime. Sometimes it’s unplanned or with short notice, but it happens more often than necessary. Compensation does occur though.
- Donny’s special attention to all things Parked seems to backfire when criticism reaches a certain critical mass. He just takes things personally and the various such threads, mainly on DNForum.com become true battlefields. Still, he said once he’d buy me a beer so I think he’s a cool guy after all. 🙂
- No escrow services.
The things I like about Sedo include their unified approach as a company: nobody takes things personally, they do care about the customers despite certain complaints. They are very cordial on the phone – and trust me, I am not always the most soft-spoken person on a business call. Sedo offers great escrow service that almost never fails to deliver for both parties. Anonymity is implemented but for obvious reasons of not bypassing them, but why would one bypass the security of an affordable escrow service? Once one gets the hang of what keywords work best, it’s easy to change multiple domains via forms. Sedo pages load fast and certain template schemes seem to be really popular with visitors.
The things I like about Parked include the exquisite template customization, ability to add content and images, the intelligent keyword management and the visibility it provides in search engines via the meta tag management. Addition of domains and keyword modification is instant! Customer service is prompt and quick as well.
So, to recap: Sedo or Parked? I use both and it seems that domains that get lots of visits but few clicks at Sedo can be customized and perform well in Parked. One should try both PPC companies and preferably, split their domain portfolio among both. Currently, Sedo has a great geo-auction that will last for a total of 7 days, aptly titled “Around the World in 7 Days”. I have listed two of my domains there, Constantinople.com and Aegean.info – both with a reserve that matches the quality of the domain.
Now let’s go out and make some money!
Theo….
Great article! Thanks for the info and sharing your thoughts on Sedo and Parked!
Tony
My experience:
The only parking company I have been using was SEDO.
Last November they stopped providing the Google ad feed through XML so I moved my domains to Parked.com because all was saying this parking company was terrific.
And that’s true! My domain earnings for the same names were multiplicated by 3!! (and is NOT a joke).
So I guess Parked have a better deal with his ad feed provider or is offering a higher share to domainers.
I like your post the – it’s great.
Sedo is great if a person wants to sell a domain name (the parking revenue sucks – it’s not worth to park the domains with them if you do not intend to sell them).
Parked and NameDrive are paying reasonable money to the domain name owners when they park their domains with them.
Acro, i agree with your view on Sedo & Parked. 95% of my domains parked with those two companies.
BTW, Sedo approve keywords instant now 🙂
Do you mind sharing your experience with Sedo related links .. if it “on/off” ?
Thanks for the great article!
Do you have any experience as to how the revenue generated from Godaddy parked domains service compares to Parked.com?
“but why would one bypass the security of an affordable escrow service?”
Greed!
To save the 10% commission some would foolishly
bypass Sedo and risk a direct sale.
Patrick
I agree. Most escrow services will cover you in the event of a loss. I prefer Sedo for the simplicity of the process. To get the Sedo staff motivated, email them often telling them they are doing a great job 🙂
So Parked seems to be the better of the two from a parking perspective – how do they compare with Namedrive?
BTW, nice blog Theo!
Nice evaluation of both companies. The offer is always open for a beer, coke, or any type of beverage if you are ever interested. 🙂 The wife and son have me in Orlando at least once a month.
I think each company does well with certain domains, certain types of traffic, and what somebody is expecting from their traffic. If people tell me two things, I can tell them where it will make more money. All I need is the domain and the volume of traffic it gets each day and it’s very easy to tell you where a domain will make more money.
Good Luck.
Donny
I agree with you about the yo-yo effect in Sedo. My earnings are highly volatile..Up and Down
while i agree that parked does a great job of parsing the keywords in a domain, i find that their system can often have problems matching those keywords in combination to produce the most relevant ads.
for instance, i’m willing to bet that the parking page for your domain above, unless and until you tweaked it, was full of ads pertaining to ‘registry’ and not to ‘mortgage licensing system and registry’
i don’t know that your 6-word domain is actually the best example to point out this flaw since it is so damn long! :O) more obvious is when you have a 2-word keyword domain, and the ads are only relevant to the 2nd word, such as for example, something like softwaretools may be parsed correctly as ‘software tools’ but you get a page with ads for home depot, framing hammers, electrical saws, etc.
the result is that i often have to manually hardcode the keyword to get the desired effects.
this is something i’ve pointed out to parked in their recent online survey, which i was happy to participate in.
Hi Mike,
Obviously, that domain was an example to describe the accuracy of the parser. There were no ads about registry as you mentioned, everything was mortgage & loan related.
On the other hand, Sedo’s splitting of “GameSurf.com” was seriously unsuccessful, providing ads about “surf”, “beaches” etc. despite the keyword being “video games” and the category “computers/electronics”. Sedo claims Google does that, defying the Sedo-suggested keywords and splits the domain as it wishes. In a similar manner, my domain 360.org displayed ads unrelated to “xbox 360” – not a single one was related to video games. There are many more such examples. It seems that Parked has an advantage with keyword parsing and content display.