Is domain parking ruining the Internet?

[andrejc]

I'm just wondering about this..

Yes I know, we all park domains and earn lots of money from type-in traffic and advertising some companies who are bidding few cents on adwords and others..

But have you ever wondered why is someone actually typeing your domain name directly into browser? Lets take "jobs.com" for example.. Someone who is looking for job and who is newbie at internet will type jobs.com in IE address bar because he doesn't know any other way for searching (hasn't heard about Google yet). And someone who has little more expirience with web will type it because he knows that jobs.com is great domain, probably owned by some great company who is offering great jobs (I really don't know who owns jobs.com, just took it for basic example).

So, what's next? A simple page with lots of ads is shown.. The first guy (the "noob") will think that all those companies listed here are best and will immediatelly click on few of those ads. Then the publisher earns few bucks and visitor is sent to (most probably) some crappy page (it could be any company who offerd a few cents CPC).. Then the surfer thinks that he found best offer around and isn't aware that he could fund much better opportunities if he simply typed "jobs" into google.. The other guy will recognize the parked page and will most probably leave it..

So, as much as I can see, only the parked doman owner has some advantage from this - well not some, but much, because there are so many "noob" users around => lots of typein traffic..

BTW, does anyone know what percentage of domains around is used just for earning this direct revenue (parking) ?

Sry for my bad english.. Merry Christmas

 

[DNjet]

I think google has stated that parked pages make up 10% of their billions $ yearly.

 

[MediaHound]

I think it was recently about 16%.

 

[fatter]

I think domain parking actually contributes to the success of the internet, a parked page gives competiting advertisers fairly equall oppurtunity to convert a visitor to a sale. take your example jobs.com if it were parked many competing job sources could be listed on the page, where if a single company owned it like monster.com all traffic would go to a single source. It also povides consumers a better choice, ie competition for the sale.
Both consumers and businesses profit from parked pages where when a specific company owns prime domains only that company benefits

 

[B.King]

I think domain parking actually contributes to the success of the internet, a parked page gives competiting advertisers fairly equall oppurtunity to convert a visitor to a sale. take your example jobs.com if it were parked many competing job sources could be listed on the page, where if a single company owned it like monster.com all traffic would go to a single source. It also povides consumers a better choice, ie competition for the sale.
Both consumers and businesses profit from parked pages where when a specific company owns prime domains only that company benefits

Great comment , adds a new perspective to this