Domain Parking Basics

Put simply, domain parking involves renting out an unused domain to pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. These advertisers bid for placement ...

Put simply, domain parking involves renting out an unused domain to pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. These advertisers bid for placement on keywords and their ads appear on relevant domain names. For example, if you owned the domain "CellPhones.com", you'd likely get ads from online stores selling cell phones. Every time someone visits your domain, and clicks an advertiser's link, that advertiser is billed for the click, and you receive a share of that money (usually around 50%).

Before you can begin generating income with your domain names, however, they must be getting traffic. Traffic is truly the driving force behind all commercial enterprise on the internet, and parked domains are no exception to this rule. To begin receiving traffic, you must either purchase an expired or expiring domain which already has some existing traffic, or attempt to promote a new (trafficless) domain. Of course, if you already own a domain with traffic, you simply have to sign-up for a parking program and start generating revenue.

Once you are getting a steady stream of visitors, you will be able to track each domain's click-through rate (the percentage of visitors who click on an ad), and average revenue per click. Once you know these two figures, you will also be able calculate your eCPM (average amount earned per thousand visitors).

In addition to click through revenue, some domain parking programs (such as DomainSponsor) will also pay you a fixed amount of "popup revenue", based on the total amount of traffic that your domain receives.