How hard is it to start a parking company?

[PokerPie]

Hi,

Say I wanted to start a domain parking company. What would this entail from a tech standpoint? How hard is this to do?

For instance, could I pay developers to create a site and system for me, and then simply run the customer service and business development myself? Or would there be ongoing tedious tech related issues to deal with?

Anybody know of any white label parking companies who provide the backend/stat tracking etc?

I'm obviously not a tech guy, but I have some great ideas for how to improve upon the current parking business model, just not sure how high the barriers to entry are from a tech standpoint.


Thanks for any input.

[Acro]

It's not hard at all. The hard part is committing to your financial obligations towards those that park their domains

[Onward]

If you want to go the quick way and have a niche market you can target...you may want to try this:

http://www.skenzo.com/products/priva...rking_program/

[PokerPie]

If you want to go the quick way and have a niche market you can target...you may want to try this:

http://www.skenzo.com/products/priva...rking_program/

Wow, perfect. Thanks a lot. Yes a niche market is exactly what I have.

I'm not sure if they will accept me as their site says they only work with people who do 1,000,000 uniques per month+, so I'm still very interested in other replies to the OP.

[Sheva]

If you want to go the quick way and have a niche market you can target...you may want to try this:

http://www.skenzo.com/products/priva...rking_program/

On the web site I canot find how much they charge or which % share they take for this. Also there is someone that tried this whch are the results?

Please answer.

[petrosc]

Sheva, it may not be worth it as with DS big portfolio owners have 75% or even more, and DS has 80% rev share from Google I think and they have all that technology a newly formed company can't have unless they invest serious money, so my opinion is it's better to park the majority with them and not worry about having your own feed

[actnow]

Sheva, it may not be worth it as with DS big portfolio owners have 75% or even more, and DS has 80% rev share from Google I think and they have all that technology a newly formed company can't have unless they invest serious money, so my opinion is it's better to park the majority with them and not worry about having your own feed

Petrosc's comments are valid.

Since, Google will eventually control 95% of the ppc category, they will never let
you make much money. Plus, you are subject to their whims regarding domains and revenue share.

Just like the U.S. auto industry, there will be a market for trucks and suvs but the best days are behind them.

You need to think what is the next hot way to monetize your domains since ppc revenue will continue to decline.

[Sheva]

so you are saying better to park the majority with DS?
There is one think that I like about skenzo is the International things, I mean I have very good and lot of domains in Italian language that are not good optimized from DS and others sedo included.

[Onward]

On the web site I canot find how much they charge or which % share they take for this. Also there is someone that tried this whch are the results?

Please answer.

I met the reps from Skenzo at the last traffic conference...I can put you in touch with them if you wish....

[Sheva]

I met the reps from Skenzo at the last traffic conference...I can put you in touch with them if you wish....

thank you, sent you a pm.

[PokerPie]

You need to think what is the next hot way to monetize your domains since ppc revenue will continue to decline.

This is exactly my motivation. I have a very good way to monetize domains in the specific niche I want to target, gambling/poker domains. Currently Fabulous is head and shoulders above the competition but even they are not maximizing the traffic. They outsource it to other people. Those people then sell the ad space to others. All of those middle men and their profit taking is really diluting the earnings of those who park their domains.

Google AdSense is the absolute worst for gambling domains, they pay pennies on the dollar for what that traffic is worth!

So how can I monetize my own domains and do it for others? Just skenzo or pay xxx,xxx+ to setup my own infrastructure? Anybody have a clue what a bare bones parking operation would cost to setup?

[2fly1]

How hard is it to be an Olympian? Almost impossible.

Getting the parking company built, the legal part under control and blocking out the hackers trying to take you down is one thing - Not toooooo bad ----- While getting a top Tier Primary Feed Provider is next to implossible.

I'm pretty damn big into parking as in that's just about all "Full time Domainer" I do and have studied for the last 3 years. I'm here to tell you....I want a tier-one primary feed provider baaaaad, This is my ultimate goal as a domainer. I want a parking company.

It's a serious process for the VERY determined business minded domainer.

Oh yes, did I say...This is no easy task? 25,000,000 - 50,000,000 page views per month might get you on the waiting list

Good luck!

Hi,

Say I wanted to start a domain parking company. What would this entail from a tech standpoint? How hard is this to do?
.

[PokerPie]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for that. Very helpful.

Could somebody please define for me what this means:

tier-one primary feed provider

I did some Google searching and it appears this is just the stream of ads? So you are saying, basically, that it is very hard to find somebody who wants to run their ads on your domains?

[2fly1]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for that. Very helpful.

Could somebody please define for me what this means:
I did some Google searching and it appears this is just the stream of ads? So you are saying, basically, that it is very hard to find somebody who wants to run their ads on your domains?

If you want someone who's going to pay as good as possible like goog or yahoo it's unbelievably difficult.

Not sure what you need defined? Feed provider is who supplies the ads and the money.

[PokerPie]

Interesting, thank you. I wasn't aware the industry worked that way.

What I essentially wanted to do was to not have a feed provider, or rather, to be my own. I can link the domainers with the advertisers myself. I don't want to cut Yahoo or Google in on the profits

So given that, is this still really hard to do? Anybody aware of some kind of an existing product which might work for me? Basically all I am proposing is to serve my template or mini-sites on other peoples domains, serve ads on them (which do not need to be provided by a 3rd party) and report traffic and click through statistics to the domainers and advertisers. The problem being that I don't even know how to use FTP so doing any of that myself is impossible.

[Bodis.com]

Extremely hard. One of the harder markets to penetrate, but once you do penetrate it, the profits could be promising.

The problem really is the tedious technical stuff that you asked about. Some can argue with me. but to me, parking is more about software than anything else. The parking application has to be constantly monitored and updated.

First off, you'll need at least 20 ideal servers to start with, setup within the correct environment. You'll need a minimum of 2 DNS servers, a set of application servers, probably around 5 with load balancing hardware, you'll then need a group of database servers to store and pull data from, the minimum replicable setup for a database is 3 servers, these once again may need to be load balanced. On top of that, you'll need backup servers to backup your data. You'll need to backup your development work, production files, production database, and possibly emails. That leads to having a server for emails and you'll need software to backup all this data. Then you'll need a server for development, or multiple development servers to test your multi-server application before it goes to production. Expect a cost of at least $5,000 - $10,000 per month on server hardware costs alone just to get up and running.

You'll need someone to monitor these servers.

The code alone on Bodis is all written from scratch and is already over 300,000 lines of code in pure backend code. This is without HTML, javascript, or any front-end work. And even at this point, we are not even close to delivering a final product. That's btw 6,000 pages of code.

Who will design your company? Your landing pages? Who will develop it? Who will keep monitoring, running, and updating? Who will work out the deals?

What about accounting? Office space? Employees? Outsourcing?

Expect to invest 2 years of your work and anywhere from 1-3 million dollars before you can see it running. And don't expect profits to start pouring in anytime after your product is live either. It takes time, unless you have the same feed as DomainSponsor does - but you'll need 100 million dollars revenue annually, and a time-machine to takes you back to 2005 because Google no longer gives that feed out.

Best of luck!

[PokerPie]

Great post, yet obv very discouraging. Thanks for taking the time to write that up!

[Bodis.com]

Thanks. I didn't mean to discourage anyone! This really applies to any business, not just domain parking.

I didn't really know what I was getting into myself when starting Bodis, but now I very much know what I got myself into. I just wanted to show others that it's not an easy task to run a domain parking company, but if you invest your time and try hard without giving up, I am sure you can succeed. I am still counting on it myself as well.

As mentioned, best of luck if you do try to develop a parking program!

[Sheva]

what about if one want to buy share of a ppc company already existing and get for his domains 100% of what the ppc company get from yahoo/google?

[NetworkMsia]

Thanks for sharing Matt,

Rather than starting a parking company, I rather start an "auto development" domains company.