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Friday, 01 May 2009 13:49 |
Well, think about it. We've all been to parked pages, and I don't think anyone would pretend that there is a single parked page out there that would be considered the world's foremost authority on the subject of the domain name it's attached to. So, given that parked pages generally of pretty poor quality when it comes to delivering fresh original content, why would people be visiting them? Well, chances are that they are looking for something, but what exactly are they looking for do you think?
- The most likely thing that they are looking for is another site if the truth be told. A senior executive at a major parking company wrote the following to me with respect to the traffic that parking companies get (I emailed the question to the Exec as research for this article), and I quote the reply verbatim, only masking the company name:
"The amount of traffic across the industry would be roughly 70% typo and the remainder from generic. It might be best not to name ******** directly as the source."
Now a lot of this traffic is captured by domain squatters and typo squatters, who are intending to defraud legitimate site owners, but even generic domain names are major beneficiaries of this natural tendancy of the internet to produce overspill.
But for the purposes of being fair, we can discount traffic source #1 for the very purest generic domain names, but that still leaves us with 3 major traffic sources.
- The visitor is a domainer, or someone connected with the domain industry, and they are interested in finding out what it on the page, who owns it, or who parks it. It's no coincidence that the traffic to my minor domains always rises sharply if I let them go to the wire before renewing them - in fact it's a good tactic to help pay for the renewals on domain names - it normally only adds up to cents, but it all counts. I've read estimates that domain industry traffic accounts for anything up to 50% of the traffic on generic domain names. Another truth is that the biggest the company or individual owning the generic domain name, the more PR it gets, and PR as we all know is priceless for bringing visitors.
If you don't believe this then ask yourself how many parked domains you can name where you either know the name of the guy or company that owns them, or you know when / how much they sold for. All of the big guys like to talk about the domains in their portfolios, and then all the little guys flock there to visit and see what the big guy is doing in the hope that some of the magic might rub off. Ok, two traffic sources left....
- The visitor is looking for a site that used to be at the domain name - something that is increasingly common in these tough economic times, but unless the site was a commercial link list, then I can't imagine that this visitor is going to prefer the parked page over what they were actually looking for. What do you think?... As an exercise lets imagine that Twitter got replaced with a parking page of social media ads... have I convinced you yet?
- And finally visitor type number 4: the type of person who visits a parked page because they have so little internet savvy that they are holding onto the mistaken belief that websites with quality domain names are automatically going to be delivering quality content. After they've been to a few parked pages maybe they realise that using a quality search engine to find the information they are after would be a better plan, and that's why they are not repeat visitors?
Now don't get me wrong - I love domain parking, I get around 1/2 million visitors a month to my domains and make very good money from it, but I wouldn't describe any of the above four categories of visitor are being the most valuable or purest traffic on the internet. Additional evidence of this can be taken from the fact that the traffic on parked domain names rarely rises exponentially unless the subject of the domain in question is in the news (i.e. the real world news, or the domaining news. For example my recent purchase of Lets.com (<< see the namedropping) experienced a peak of traffic in the few weeks after I bought it at auction as many of the blogs talked about the sale price) .
The argument against the high quality of type in traffic is given further support from the fact that most parking page visitors are non-repeat - i.e. that the lost souls stumbling onto these parking pages are in no hurry to return to them.
In my opinion, the purest, most valuable traffic in the internet is that of a repeat visitor returning to a site because of the quality of the content, or the uniqueness of the editorial, or the high quality of the manufacturing of the products on sale, or the great prices or services on offer..... So maybe that's what we should be aspiring to with our parked domains? |
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