Standards – Part 12 – The trouble with being a parking company
Written by Michael Gilmour , Monday, 31 March 2008
I think that there should be a saying, “Parking, damned if you don’t, damned if you do….”. This is definitely the cast for domain parking companies that are under pressure from multiple directions and now most recently standards and transparency.
My experience has shown that parking companies have either embraced, been silent or have actively worked against the introduction to standards. The reasons for these reactions are sound and are typically self serving (which is not wrong!). Let me share with you a story about a friend of mine and his experience with one particular parking company.
For the past 12 months he had been faithfully adding a lot of domains to his parking account at “Park X” (I won’t say who it is to protect my friend). A strange thing happened, the more domains he added and the more traffic that they accrued the lower his Earnings Per Click fell. This was obviously not a good outcome.
Through a Park X disaffected employee he found out that during this time his revenue share had been reduced by 10%. When he queried his account representative no reasons were given and the length of time it had been reduced was not known.
This simple experience clearly illustrates that due to a lack of transparency a parking company was able to do whatever they liked to a domainers account and the only recourse that the domain owner has is to leave.
This brings me to a point that I raised in an earlier article. There are a number of parking companies that are trying to implement a level of transparency. It is a difficult process and but more importantly what are they being transparent about? The nice thing about these companies is that they are trying to head down the road towards transparency and standards as they are viewing the lack of movement by other companies as a potential competitive advantage. All power to these guys!
Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmore – Reprinted with Permission – March 31, 2008