I have a bad habit of collecting domain names and have been parking them with Sedo Parking for a while in an attempt to make a few bucks by having ads on the domains. The idea is that I would make enough to at least support my habit and have the domains pay for themselves through ad clicks. A few months ago Google made its Adsense for Domains available to regular folks so I finally got around to trying it out at the beginning of March. I took one of my domains that I had parked with Sedo and switched it to use Google Adsense for Domains. I wanted to see how it would perform before I moved all of my domains over.
Google Adsense for Domains is like all other Google products, very minimalistic. It doesn’t have as nice of reporting capabilities as Sedo and the template choices are very limited. Also, it is somewhat cumbersome to set up the domain with Adsense and could be time consuming for a large numer of domains. But the real issue is, how does it stack up as far as ad revenue? I suppose it would be better if I had more than a month’s worth of statistics, but it is probably a pretty good indication of how it will do in the future. Here is the low down:
Google Adsense for Domains:
March $15.09
Sedo Parking:
December: $5.83
January: $7.42
February $3.65
I thought I would include three months of Sedo data for a better average. It looks like Google Adsense is the clear winner here in the money department, just as I suspected it would be since it is cutting out the middle man. The difference is pretty significant. Now I will be working on switching over all of my other domains. I know I’m not going to get rich since I don’t have any really good domain names that people would just type in on accident or domain name misspellings, but if I can make enough to have the domains pay for themselves, I will be happy. Then one day when (or if) I actually get around to developing them into money making sites, I will be glad I kept them.
Tags: domain parking, google adsense, sedo
May 18th, 2009 at 2:24 am
i heard parking increases traffic however, thus increasing your domain value – is that true?
May 18th, 2009 at 10:58 am
I don’t know that for a fact but it seems like it would be true in theory. Parking a domain usually gets it listed on the search engines which would definitely increase traffic.
August 21st, 2009 at 6:14 am
Hi Melinda
What kind of traffic levels are you getting to generate that revenue, if you don’t mind me asking?
August 25th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Paul,
The numbers vary quite a bit from month to month so I averaged 4 months worth of unique hits together and it averaged 256 a month. So not a ton really, the domain was formerly a “real” site, so that helps with click through rates I think.
September 8th, 2009 at 12:07 am
[...] You won't get rich like the Many who did in the good ol' type in domain name days But… Google Adsense for Domains vs. Sedo Parking | Melinda's Musings [...]
April 20th, 2010 at 9:01 pm
If I purchase clicks on a website as advertising and the people there go to my parked domain and click ads, is that legal?
May 14th, 2010 at 8:28 am
good topic
June 26th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Thanks for the tip on Adsense domain parking, I’m going to give that a try myself and see if I come out better than my standard shared revenue parking page from my Godaddy reseller account.