Marchex made news back in 2004 when it went public as one of the first domain-based Internet companies.  The company made some historic domain name purchases, and Yahoo Finance describes them as a "digital call advertising and small business marketing company" and claims that their business earns money from

200,000 of its owned and operated Web sites, and other sources. The company also delivers pay-per-click advertisements to online users in response to their keyword search queries or on pages they visit on its distribution network of search engines, shopping engines, third party vertical and local Web sites, mobile distribution, and its proprietary Web site traffic sources.

Last Friday, we informed you of a malicious D-DOS attack resulting in a variety of technical consequences. Most of these issues were resolved within a few hours. However, based on your good feedback and internal analysis, it has become obvious that we have not been monetizing optimally since that day, therefore showing lower revenues in your account than were shown before March 9. This is mainly caused by the feed used for the related links.

Please be assured that we will be compensating you for the parking decrease, should you be affected by it. Details will follow as soon as possible.

How can the rest of us keep up with this fast-changing industry? If you are strapped for time, I recommend two sources that all domainers should keep up with - DNJournal and DomainNameWire.

DNJournal

DNJournal is Ron Jackson's "electronic trade magazine" for the domain industry.  I remember stumbling upon this resource in 2004 when Ron wrote an article on Pool.com.  The earliest article that I can find online is A March 2003 article about DomainSpa.  It's hard to fine these older issues on the site - which is not the best organized site out there.  (I finally found a "Cover Story Archive" here.) Jackson does a great job of promoting new businesses in the domain space and making everyone aware of what is going on in the industry.  His background as a journalist shows in his clear writing style, and he is an all-around nice guy.  There's no mud-slinging at DNJournal.

The best weekly recap of publicly-available domain sales is also at DNJournal.  This is a great resouce for domain sellers.  Send interested buyers to Ron's Domain Sales section to give them an idea of just how much some people will pay for a good domain name.  Most of your domains won't sell for these prices, of course, but it can be an eye-opener for a potential buyer who doesn't understand why they can't just pay you $50 for your domain.

DomainNameWire 

Andrew Allemann started DomainNameWire in 2005.  Andrew's style was more critical than Ron's from the beginning.  Ron Jackson's DNJournal was a friendly publication promoting the domain industry, while Andrew's was more of an industry watchdog.  He has been a vocal critic of some of GoDaddy's policies, for example, and covered the Moniker-Monte Cahn legal dispute in great detail.  Allemann doesn't even shy away from writing critical words about self-proclcimed "Domain King" Rick Schwartz.  

Allemann conducts an annual survey of the industry every year, and dribbles the results out over the course of several weeks.  I understand that he wants people to return to his site - but if the results are in, then just tell us the results already.  

I highly recommend reading DomainNameWire at least weekly (also available at the cool 3-letter domain dnw.com) and reading DNJournal at least monthly.  If you keep up with these two publications you will be up-to-date on the domain industry.

[Disclosure - In the early days of DomainNameWire I wrote some guest articles for them, and my name still appears as a guest writer.  I do not and have never received any compensation from them.]

KeyDrive S.A./Luxembourg includes the Key-Systems Group in St. Ingbert/Saarland (Germany), the NameDrive Group (Luxembourg/USA) as well as Moniker and SnapNames (Florida and Oregon/USA) with more than 160 employees.

After the takeover of Moniker in January 2012 the group ranks among the TOP 10 biggest ICANN registrars in 6th place in relation to the number of managed gTLD domain names; the group currently administers a total of more than 6 million domains.

Both SnapNames and Moniker were challenging acquisitions for Oversee.net. SnapNames lost its most important domain registrar, Network Solutions, shortly after the acquisition in 2007. It then dealt with the so-called “halvarez” scandal where a SnapNames employee was found shill bidding in auctions.  Moniker was also a challenge, primarily because it was purchased at the peak in early 2008. Oversee.net paid about $24 million for the domain registrar. Although the sale price hasn’t been disclosed, you can be it took a sizable loss on the sale.

Moniker and SnapNames Sold to KeyDrive S.A.

I have a few domains at Moniker, and I won't be in a hurry to move them.  It remains to be seen if their reputation for securty remains a part of their marketing.  Many of the U.S. employees keep their jobs for now. 

The first iteration of the platform provides all of the tools that were available with WhyPark - including, of course, the "domain apps."  There is a very easy process you'll go through to migrate your domains to the new platform. It took me less than a minute.  According to their instructions:

The first time you login to Domain Apps, you will complete the migration process. That's it! Your domains will remain unaffected and you will be able to quickly start managing your domains again. You will receive an email when the migration process has been completed. This can range from under 1 minute to several minutes, depending on the number of domains you have with us.

The old WhyPark nameservers will still work, but you get an added bonus if you update to the new domainapps name servers - you can now switch your domains seamlessly between Parked domain parking and domainapps content and app sites.  I haven't updated my name servers yet - and I can confirm that this step is not really necessary at first.

I have been actively involved as a Business Angel for quite a while, and I might increase investments there and/or dive in deeper into one of my startups, once I have found ‘the next big thing. 

It always seemed like Google's intent to not index parked domains.  You've probably had it happen to you (although not recently).  You do a search and find a result that appears promising, only to land on a page full of ads.   It's not a good user experience.  On December first Google announced that they now officially remove parked domains from the index.  They are now being very explicit about at least some of the changes they are making.  Notice the third bullet point:

• Related query results refinements: Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search you type. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “red widgets.”
• More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.
• New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.
• More autocomplete predictions: With autocomplete, we try to strike a balance between coming up with flexible predictions and remaining true to your intentions. This change makes our prediction algorithm a little more flexible for certain queries, without losing your original intention.
• Fresher and more complete blog search results: We made a change to our blog search index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.
• Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.
• Live results for Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League: This change displays the latest scores & schedules from these leagues along with quick access to game recaps and box scores.
• Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.
• Layout on tablets: We made some minor color and layout changes to improve usability on tablet devices.
• Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.

As new parking companies spring up, some of them will temporarily miss the "classifier" - but not for long.  If you want to be in Google, then you should consider building a site with some content.  

There are some unanswered questions.  Where do content-like "parking" services such as WhyPark fit in?  You can actually host unique content-driven sites on such services  

I probably won't be immediately trying these services out - but it's interesting that new domain parking services are trying to make a go of it in a tough market.  If you have some of your domains set-up at Above.com you may want to give these new services a try.