Recently hand registered domain earns $4.87 a click

November 17, 2010

I’m pretty lazy about checking my parking stats and am usually more concerned with developing and selling names. Recently starting using a pretty cool iP hone app which lets me glance at daily and monthly revenue as well as well as my top performing names for the day.

Noticed that one of my hand registrations (Free800Number.com) just earned $4.87 a click on Smartname. Logged in to my account and see that the name is doing pretty well (especially for a non-optimized straight parking page which I haven’t spent any time customizing).

Turns out this name received 70 unique visitors this month, has a 17% click-through rate and generated $22.93 this month. Average Revenue per click for the month is $1.91, so I don’t know if the $4.87 click was a fluke or an upward trend (possibly due to Smartname changing to a Bing feed), but one can hope.

Of course most my hand registered names don’t do this well parking, but it is a nice surprise and should pay some renewal fees while I decide to develop or resell the name.

Feel free to post any of your own specific domain parking examples (good or bad) below. If there is any interest I might make this a regular feature so we can all learn from each others experiences.

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

Mike 11.17.10 at 3:12 pm: Your revenue will go down soon. It always does. None of these parking sites allow you to maintain that level of PPC… I say “allow” because dare we ask them questions about traffic source metrics, etc – they clam up. Its all a scam. There is zero regulation in the domain name word, the ppc world and especially in the online advertising world – so why would anyone want to have to be honest about the revenue we earn and why it suddenly falls off the face of the earth — whether with SmartName, Godaddy, Sedo – doesnt matter.
Uzoma 11.17.10 at 5:32 pm: Mike is right, it’s nothing but scam. I had just pulled all my domains from Sedo. They keep selling all kinds of namees, I don’t know how they do it, but something stinks.The parking companies are all in some type of collusion to deprive the domain owner of their legitimate revenue. What they forget is that, were they to pay the money to the domain owner, this entire industry will prosper. Domains will be a legitimate investment grade commodity. As it stands, it doesn’t add up. I will soon start inviting the attorney General to investigate these outfits. I doubt any of them can withstand a little light.
Poodles 11.17.10 at 6:27 pm: Agree with Mike…once you start receiving high PPC on domains at places like SmartName and others they immediately shut off the spout and your revenue dries up. I’ve had many names generating high PPC at SmartName. When they shut off the ‘water’ I move them away. They have the nerve to ask why and when you ask them why…well, Mike said it all.
TeenDomainer 11.17.10 at 7:07 pm: Nice click and nice hand registered name. There are still tons of great names out there it just takes time to find them!
Mike Sullivan 11.17.10 at 7:21 pm: Great name. There should be a good market for that one. Enjoy the PPC until you develop or flip it.
admin 11.17.10 at 11:39 pm: Thanks for the comments – I’ll try to do a follow up post on this name in a few months to compare revenue per click. Just to put it in perspective, I ran a report for 6 months ago and Smartname was paying an average RPC of $1.93 for this name, which is pretty close to the average $1.91 they are paying this month. I’m guessing the $4.87 per click yesterday was a fluke, although looking at the reports I see that I’ve been paid a RPC of between $3 and $4.87 on this name several times over the past six months.

I’ve also had some good earning names drop dramatically in the past – not so much with Smartnames (yet), but I keep meaning to run more comparative reports and test names with dropping revenue with different parking companies. I used to do this more, but with diminishing payouts, it’s not worth the time in many cases.

That said, I’m seeing a nice uptick with some of the names I still have at Parked.com.

Anyone else seeing higher earnings this month or want to share a record CPC they have received for a domain this month?