The air seems to be leaking out of the domain development balloon as domain owners discover just how much work domain development involves. It’s not enough to develop a domain, you then have to maintain it. That means, at a minimum, keeping WordPress up to date and continuing to add new content. Multiply that times a large domain portfolio and you are asking the impossible. For that reason domain parking continues to offer the most bang for the buck for most domain portfolio owners.
In the next few weeks I will be updating the ParkQuick.com website with new reviews and up-to-date information on the state of parking in 2010. It’s gotten a little stale. In the mean time, here’s who continues do to well:
- Parked is arguably the best of the traditional parking companies. They run a tight ship and keep fraud at a minimum, which rewards honest domain owners. Income had held up there over the past few months.
- Sedo does a little of everything, and their one click pages still do great on a number of my domains.
- NameDrive is a close competitor and now offers many of the same services.
- DomainSponsor does a good job of automatically building a page based on what users are looking for. Sometimes it’s not what you think.
- WhyPark is the best of the quasi-development platforms right now. You can set-it-and-forget-it or you can tweak your domains and add custom content.
- I had high hopes for SmartName, but earnings have disappointed lately. Your mileage may vary
I could have just as easily said that Monster plans an Epik conference. Venture Capitalist and Internet entrepreneur Rob Monster is working to build a platform that supplants domain parking.
His Epik platform primarily uses tools from EvoLanding to create a semantic web of sites that feed traffic into one another. He recently announced the first Epic Developer’s Conference. The early bird registration for the event is just $595 and ends on July 15. The event itself takes place in Seattle September 15th – 17th at the Edgewater Waterfront Hotel.
For more information visit their site at the Epik blog.
Domain marketplace Afternic announced on June 29th that they have implemented a new portfolio manager to make it easier for domain owners to manage their domains at the company. According to the press release:
“Afternic Portfolio Manager provides our customers the ability reconcile their inventory in a single request, while providing instantaneous add, edit, and remove domain functionality,” said David Hauser, NameMedia Senior Vice President. “Today’s launch means that large portfolio owners have a reliable, flexible and simple web service solution to effectively manage inventory in real-time while placing the domain names for sale at AfternicDLS.”
If you login to your account you should see the new manager. It looks pretty much like the old manager to me, so I will need to spend some time with it to see what’s really new.
TrafficZ notified users June 11th that they fixed the problems with their backend that domainers use to manage their domains. I received emails on June 10th stating that they were having
network issues stemming from our hosting company. This will not affect revenue in any way. All parking pages are currently functional; however, use of the TrafficZ Manager is currently down.
Less than 24 hours later they sent an email reporting that their domain manager has been restored. I was impressed with TrafficZ‘s great communication with its users during this problem.
NameMonetizer 