What is Domain Parking? Well, You Can Certainly Cover Your Domain Costs With It

3 min read,
Published Sep 1, 2011

As you know, domains are important when it comes to your business. Many of you register .me, .com, .net and other top-level domain variants. Or maybe you had that great idea and registered a domain name for a project you never had the chance to start.

Now you have 1, 10 or 100 domains just sitting there. Until you start a website on one of them, you’re still paying a yearly registration fee. Can you somehow make some money out of them? With domain parking, you can!

Monetizing Your Domains

When you register a domain name that will not be used as a primary domain name (like on your business cards or in e-mails), you can do 2 things;

  • Redirect it to your site,
  • You can park it.

Several services like Sedo or NameDrive specialize in domain parking and monetization, but make sure to check with your domain registrar if it provides domain parking services. Even Google has its AdSense for Domains that you can use.

Once you decide to park a domain, all you will have to do is point your domain’s DNS record to a website where you want to park your domain. If you’re not sure what DNS is and how DNS system works, we have a nice tutorial for you!

Example of a parked domain site

Depending on the service where you want to park, maybe you’ll have to sign up first and take some short verification process.

What Will Appear on Your Domains Once Parked?

The parking service where you park your domain has several template landing pages that your domain will point to. If your parking provider allows it, you can slightly edit the design of the site, add and remove modules etc.

The only content that will be on that landing page are ads that relate to your domain. Every time users get to your landing page, they will click on an ad and you will get some amount of money for that. Cent by cent, here comes your paycheck and you’re covering the cost of that domain.

What If You Don’t Want To Park Anymore?

You are still the owner of the domain and if you decide that you don’t want your domain to be parked, just change the DNS records back to your servers. Keep in mind; it takes several hours for DNS to be updated throughout the Web.

Setting your DNS records

Many domain professionals claim they get a decent sum of money in this domain parking business. Have your tried it out? Do you think contextual ads on your own site are a better solution?

Title image credit: custodio.hubpages.com

Nikola Krajacic