Domain landing pages account for 5-10% of total SEO income

why waste your time writing content!

[stuartmcdonald]

This story in the Pitsburgh Post Gazette [post-gazette.com] is a pretty interesting read about domain landing pages and the type of income they're pulling in. The story suggests that 5-10% of total Search Engine income comes from sites of this kind -- the example it uses (which is using Adsense) pulls in some $150,000 a year -- not a bad return on a landing page.

[Alioc]

I was one of the former owners of a domain registration service a couple years ago. I can confirm that but you must own very high quality generic domain names or thousands of names redirected to that landing page.

Not a bad deal until a company with a big enough money bag comes and buys the names.

I don't think there's real money for new comers there anymore. All who currently enjoy the easy profits on such domain names are the registrants since early 2000.

[jomaxx]

Wait, 5-10% of AdSense revenue is from domain parking? Is that what's being said? All other things being equal, that would mean 5-10% of pageviews consists of viewing parked domain pages.

Doesn't that number seem like it's off by a factor of at least 10, if not 100?

[jomaxx]

Hmm, www.flashgames.com draws 240,000 visitors a month. Yet its Alexa ranking is 275,489.

The site earns revenue of more than $150,000 a year. $150K / 240K / 12 months = 5 cents a visitor. That's $50 CPM, for a Flash games website.

What's wrong with this picture? Maybe they have a whole network of sites. This one domain earning that much $$, I'm going to stop short of saying it's impossible but it stretches credulity.

[stuartmcdonald]

By metricsmarket they're getting a little over 40,000 sessions a month -- I guess what differentiates sites like this from a normal content site, is that the vast majority of ways out of the site are via a paid link so you're going to see a higher CTR than what you may see on a "normal" site. But still, the MM figure and the alexa ranking leave a couple of unanswered questions.

[Alioc]

All other things being equal, that would mean 5-10% of pageviews consists of viewing parked domain pages.

Yes, but in real world all things aren't equal. Click Through Rate plays the first role here.

Think about it: a highly competitive niche, a page with nothing but full of targetted ad links(which have no "Ads by Google" tag), plus very targetted stream of continuous traffic = Extreme CTR+CPM.