What Happened to Parked?

**rh287** · 08-31-2011, 11:37 PM

Damn, Parked was once the very best parking company on the net period. Still have the best analytics but damn they suck on PPC.

I'm actually making 3x more money at sedo on exact domains I moved there.

Not sure what happened, but they, (Donny), blew a good thing.

**Mark Talbot** · 08-31-2011, 11:43 PM

I think parking companies chase the same rainbow that parkers do,...

... problem is there is no pot-o-gold at the end of that rainbow for everyone.

**DomainsInc** · 09-01-2011, 06:57 AM

i really need to get off my ass and move some domains but the question is where? i've tried sedo in the good ole days and wasn't impressed. i've always wanted to try namedrive. do they accept anyone or do you have to be special? I have one domain inpeticular that used to get $5-12 dollars per click, and now its like .14 cents.

**vkwebdev** · 09-01-2011, 08:27 AM

namedrive is free for registration, I just registered and added 15 domains to test looks good for now.

**David G** · 09-01-2011, 10:02 AM

Agree, parked.com has a superb interface and dashboard, excellent capabilities and very nice landing pages where you can also add your own content and links. At one time several years ago they also paid the best.

A reason (but likely not the only reason) they are a poor PPC revenue choice now is they are using Bing as an upstream provider. Parked.com's big decline appears to have started the day they switched to the Bing.com feed.

In addition, at one time they heavily participated at forums but no longer do.

**Acro** · 09-01-2011, 11:38 AM

Yahoo started banning a bunch of TLDs as second rate, and categorizing domains as adult, guns/tobacco/alcohol related, controversial domains etc. Essentially, Yahoo introduced domain racism and for that pulled the rag from under the feet of both Parked and its customers. Moving domains to sedo or Bodis sounds like the best option right now.

**David G** · 09-01-2011, 12:07 PM

Originally Posted by Acro

Yahoo started banning a bunch of TLDs as second rate, and categorizing domains as adult, guns/tobacco/alcohol related, controversial domains etc. Essentially, Yahoo introduced domain racism and for that pulled the rag from under the feet of both Parked and its customers. Moving domains to sedo or Bodis sounds like the best option right now.

They went way overboard on censorship by wrongly banning .biz and .us names (said to be all poor quality according to parked.com) to banning names like stun gun, taser gun, beer related, plus names with the word females in the url on the false ground it's adult. They also banned many names with words like buttocks, breasts, massage, young children, facial wrinkles, eyelids, facial skin even though the sites were about main-stream businesses and non-adult.

P.S. Google also does that to a lesser degree and in a different way, for example some main-stream domains with the word Buttocks or Pregnant but the lander shows nothing but hard-core xxx links for some mysterious reason though the URLs have never been used in any adult way.

**draggar** · 09-01-2011, 12:26 PM

All parking companies are going downhill, some faster than others and some have been going downhill longer than others.

Parking revenue is a fraction of what it was, even just a few years ago. Now, your best bet is development.

**Acro** · 09-01-2011, 12:40 PM

Spot on, David. I wonder why oh why oh why the nice folks at Parked don't do anything about that. Seriously, the Parked crew are some of the best in the industry. It's a shame the way Parked is functioning right now it's losing its place in the domain market.

**David G** · 09-01-2011, 12:52 PM

Originally Posted by Acro

Spot on, David. I wonder why oh why oh why the nice folks at Parked don't do anything about that. Seriously, the Parked crew are some of the best in the industry. It's a shame the way Parked is functioning right now it's losing its place in the domain market.

I also wonder why parked.com tolerates that? They were clearly number-1 before but most domainers have by now abandoned them. Several years ago I had occasional $100 days there but that quickly declined to not much more than $1 days so I am long gone.

**rh287** · 09-02-2011, 06:10 AM

Yeah, Parked still has amazing customer service. I had a PayPal issue recently, and they corrected the problem within 5 minutes. It wasn't much money, but dang it was fast. I really wish they would get back with Google and not concentrate on WhyPark so much. They are still the best in the business, (as far as customer service), and they really need to work on their core business IMHO.

I can actually remember that Parked even allowed domain arbitrage at one time.

**Raider** · 09-02-2011, 09:53 PM

When Yahoo came out with TQ scoring, it was the beginning of the end for Parked, It's really unfortunate because Parked leads the pack with the best interface.

**Tom K.** · 09-02-2011, 09:57 PM

Isn't Parked and WhyPark the same company? Now that's an oxymoron.

**dmyre** · 09-02-2011, 10:30 PM

I really miss Parked, but I had no other choice but to move all of my domains away from there.
I also like the technology behind whypark, but again, the PPC revenue just isn't there.

**David G** · 09-03-2011, 10:31 AM

Originally Posted by Raider

When Yahoo came out with TQ scoring, it was the beginning of the end for Parked, It's really unfortunate because Parked leads the pack with the best interface.

ditto. MyTQ scores jumped around for no reason going from a 9-10 down to a 1-2 and back to an 8 and back down to a 1, all with basically the same domains and same traffic. That was also about the time parked.com revenue went over the cliff. I was all nonsense and BS but Yahoo was still better overall vs the current low paying Bing feed. Trafficz also has the same issues which is unfortunate since I really liked both of them, their dashboards, capabilities and cust service.

p.s. Anyone know how the parking providers rank now from top to bottom based on their nameservers use?

**bwhhisc** · 09-04-2011, 04:17 PM

Originally Posted by DomainsInc

i've always wanted to try namedrive. do they accept anyone or do you have to be special? I have one domain inpeticular that used to get $5-12 dollars per click, and now its like .14 cents.

You just need to sign up with Namedrive, no special requirements.
They have excellent templates and some nice keywork optimization tools.

**Raider** · 09-04-2011, 11:27 PM

Originally Posted by David G

ditto. MyTQ scores jumped around for no reason going from a 9-10 down to a 1-2 and back to an 8 and back down to a 1, all with basically the same domains and same traffic. That was also about the time parked.com revenue went over the cliff.

Exactly the same pattern for me.. If your going to filter out legitimate natural type-in traffic, I want to see the records of whether or not they were PAID for that traffic, and if they were which is very likely, they owe ALL OF US a lot of Money..... If their going to use a system like TQ Scoring, there NEEDS to be transparency!

**Mark Talbot** · 09-04-2011, 11:58 PM

Originally Posted by Raider

Exactly the same pattern for me.. If your going to filter out legitimate natural type-in traffic, I want to see the records of whether or not they were PAID for that traffic, and if they were which is very likely, they owe ALL OF US a lot of Money..... If their going to use a system like TQ Scoring, there NEEDS to be transparency!

Yes

**David G** · 09-13-2011, 10:15 AM

It's really difficult to understand how in a couple years parked.com could go from the leading and best parking firm (IMO), and most popular on the forums (from what I could tell), down to the bottom of the list.

I guess you can blame it on their conversion to the poor revenue Bing.com feed but that begs the question as to why they went with Bing in the first place and also why they stay with them after they can see the bad results and so many of their accounts going elsewhere?

**biggedon** · 09-13-2011, 10:57 AM

Originally Posted by Acro

Yahoo introduced domain racism

i think domainers actually are guilty of that prestigious honor

when you look at how many domainers don't like hyphens, or how they've categorized letters of the alphabet as premium and others as non premium or even anti-premium....not wanting any numbers in the domain, black hat vs white hat, etc, etc