About Domains - Internet Domain Name Parking/Leasing Service Provider: Review

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Domain Parking/Leasing: Review

Domain-name parking is a form of leasing. Services can be grouped into two lease classes. On one side, MVD transparently forwards traffic to one advertiser per domain name; on the other, visitors to a domain name parked with other Plan Sponsors see a Web page with a menu of advertisers. These visitors then have to decide which advertiser’s link to click on, if any.

Summary of Features

Feature	Plan Sponsor
Feature	DomainMart	GoldKey (top performer), AfterNIC, Sedo,
Type of Agreement with domain-name owner	Lease to advertiser	Lease to Plan Sponsor
Business Model	Traffic is passed through exclusively to one advertiser	Multiple advertisers associated with a single domain name
Compensation to Owner	Variable commission based on advertisers’ bids	Fixed commission determined by Plan Sponsor
Sub-domains (e.g. product-1.xyz.com)	Allowed and can each be forwarded to separate pages	Not available
Acceptable Traffic	Only from natural traffic. Artificial boosting is prohibited.
Responsibility of Owner	Renew domain name Change DNS to that of the sponsor
Hosting fees	None

Which is Better?

Owner’s Perspective

It is not easy to declare a winner among the Plan Sponsors, as there are no publicly available data on commissions and traffic, as yet.
MVD requires that you initially commit to a 3-month lease, followed by a month-to-month term. Thus, MVD would not be advisable if you were planning to sell your domain name during the initial period.
With MVD, your domain name is more likely to be indexed by search engines, as MVD allows advertisers to upload files to a domain name’s index and sub-domains that are fully customizable doorways. This creates additional traffic to your domain names, as it is well documented that search-engine users are more likely to click on result links than on advertisement links.
Concluding Remarks: Since you are not obligated to transfer hosting to MVD until an advertiser is secured, we suggest that you list your domain names with them, especially if

your domain name is comprised of a keyword/phrase with a high bid on a pay-per-click search engine
a considerable portion of traffic to your domain name is from visitors following links from other Web sites, as such visitors expect to see an active site, not a menu of ads.

Advertiser’s Perspective

In terms of traffic volume, you would be better off as the sole advertiser with MVD. Moreover, you would have the power over how much to bid for visitor traffic.
Visitor volume to your domain name can provide you information on the value of the domain name.
With multi-advertisers per domain name, you don’t have much control over which countries you would accept visitors from, as you are lumped with other advertisers who may not have the same target audience. With MVD, you can lease country domains (ccTLDs) for targeted country traffic, and dot-info domains if your site, for example, provides side-by-side product/service comparisons.
MVD service allows you to test-drive the potential acquisition of a domain name without incurring large upfront cash-flow outlays.
Concluding Remarks: If traffic to your site is from various countries, but you are being compensated only for US traffic, you should consider MVD as they include total revenue from traffic in their compensation calculation, as noted above in section II.