My $114.24 Domain Embarking Experiment

Many people have heard about domain parking but I am guessing most people have not heard about domain embarking. If you don’t know what domain parking is, and how people make money from it please let me explain.

People make money from domain parking, sometimes just called domaining, by buying up domains and then making money from type in traffic. For example if you type in candy.com into your web browser you are brought to a page filled with ads.

Many domainers own tens or even hundreds of thousands of domains from which they make their money. Now I personally find this practice somewhat annoying especially when domainers buy up names that are similar to the actual site I am looking for.

However, the industry is extremely profitable both in terms of parked traffic and in terms of flipping domain names. You can find out more here from Wikipedia or read about read about it in this domain profit guide I found.

Anyway, I always knew about domaining but I assumed that all the best names were already taken and I didn’t really think it was the best long term business to be in. My views on this have not entirely changed but I came across an article that got me thinking.

The article was on the living off dividends blog and it got me thinking that maybe domain embarking was something I wanted to try. The key points were that godaddy was selling .info domains for only $0.99 (they are now $1.99 as of me writing this) and that the domain embarking website was free to use.

So what is domain embarking exactly? Domain embarking is different from simple domain parking because they create a website for you with pretty minimal effort on your part. The website is then crawled by Google and you should (in theory at least) get search engine traffic as well as type in traffic.

They then split AdSense revenue with you 50/50. In my opinion this is much better than alternative services such as Whypark.com, which charges about $100 per 100 domain names. They also have things called premium shares which you can get for referring other users and buying your domain names through them.

However, the value of these premium shares seems to be falling all the time as more users join. Nevertheless, they can be a great source of extra revenue just for pointing your website to their servers.

So, I decided to buy 96 travel related .info domain names from godaddy and see what happened. So far my domain names have been getting some traffic but no revenue yet. Since, I only paid $0.99 per domain (plus a $0.20 fee per doamin to ICANN) I will make my money back, if I can earn just over a dollar per domain over the course of the next year.

I think this seems pretty likely and I am looking forward to seeing what happens. Finally, even if I don’t generate any revenue my domain names should get some Google page rank, which will make them more valuable. I could then resell them for a profit.

In any case it seems like it is going to be a win-win situation. I will let you know more about my experiment as it progresses. If you want to learn more about domain embarking I urge you to visit their website and find out what their services can do for you.

Update [May 17th, 2008]: Click here to read the latest update on my domain embarking experiment.