Domain monetization

Welcome to the world of monetization, the a prime community of online real estate. Back in the early 90s a man named Rick Schwartz saw the future of domain names; Domain monetization as we call it now. Rick that time bought many generic domain names like men.com, eScore.com and a whole bunch of adult domain names. Men.com is no longer rick's property but he sold that prime name for $1.3 Million, he also sold eScore.com to Stanley Kaplan test preparation company for about $100 thousand. Although rick sold few of his generic domain names he still owns a good lot of them. And that just one of them now you cannot forget Frank Schilling, Sahar Sharid and many more...

So, how is the market now? and what do you do if you lost a chance on grabbing one of those prime real estate. Well in real life one would simply buy some real estate near those prime property and that exactly happened in the cyber world too. People started buying typos of domain names that were either generic or famous brands. It there exist a loan.com then someone bought a laon.com buy getting inspired by that. Mind it, its a good strategy but not a successful one always. There is a good chance that the typo you own may not be the best that exist for that particular domain and hence its value might be less than few others. It is really hard to calculate the probability of how successful a typo domain name would be, but you could use this tool at SEOChat to generate domain typos. This lead to a new generation of pseudo domainers called typo squatters. One can get lucky with a good domain typo but there are times you can be sued for trademark violation.

Is this opportunity just for individuals? Well I would say no!! Back in the early days people in the Registry (i.e the DOTcom registry)also understood what they are gonna loose, so they tried to cap the losses by proposing the Wait List Service (WLS). The whole idea of WLS was, there would be a wait list for a particular domain name. If a person wanted a domain name he could pre order it. If that domain name has to expire then he would be the next rightful contender of that domain name. This was proposed for the DOTcom and DOTnet top level domains (tlds). But the deal never went through. The DOTtv registry is another example of the registry making profit out of domain names. The DOTtv registry has marked some domains are their premium set of domain names, no one can register them but a person can only rent them for a tenure of one year. The domain renting rate for each domain is calculated on its value in the industry and changes very dynamically.

We have covered premium domain names and also typo squatting, getting further in depth lets discuss how Registrars make money off domain monetization. In a particular domain cycle (this example image is specific to that provider) there are various stages when a registrar could monetize domains he has such as:
Domains that are newly registered
Often when you register a domain name you do not point that domain to your actual hosting provider for one reason or the other (may it be testing, or you don't have hosting as of yet). What a registrar could do is give a set of nameserver records and volla!! he is monetizing your domain traffic by simply giving you a "coming soon" page filled with ads. A good example of this would be this screen cap



Domains that have expired
When a domain name expires the registrar gets 45 days of grace if he chooses to keep this domain or get a refund for it. From the 45 days given to them they give about 15 to 20 days to the registrant of the domain name for them to register it. Once the 20 day period is over the registrar parks the domain name (in few cases from the start of the 20 day period). This is a good source of quick pocket money for the registrar. Another smart move would be to keep the domain to themselves if it makes them a good sum while they have parked this concept is called as smart parking.

Page not found | 404 error
Another way to make money from domains that are registered are to monetize their 404 error pages (in few cases all error). They display a very smart looking "page not found" error with rest of the page filled with ads. This generally is not done in paid hosting, it is more seen in free hosting where companies offer free hosting but use methods like these to make money on the side.

By now the Registry also knows the money involved here, what they do is a even bigger step, they wild card an entire tld. If you havent registered a particular domain name eg. my-domain.in.com the in.com tld is so configured that it will show you a generic parked page and monetize the traffic on that domain name. Check out this example below



All said and done domain monetization is a pot full of going coins or hug bunch of green Benjamin Franklins or which ever currency you follow but not the end of the purpose of the internet. I will leave this article here and continue this topic in another article.

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