Domain sales income has held up better than domain parking income for big companies and small domain investors alike.  Sedo recently announced that 31% of it's recent income was from parking, while 69% was from sales.  Guess what they will be emphasizing down the road?  Despite this disparity, I don't expect to see these companies abandon parking.  I do expect to see more parking companies get gobbled-up by the likes of Sedo, Parked & DomainSponsor. 

What does threaten domain sales?  ICANN's plan to roll-out new TLDs will hurt sales of non .com domains.  I've dumped most of my .infos, because I believe that these new TLDs will dilute the market to such an extent that only .com and .org will really be meaningful in the future.   

Domain development has even taken a hit lately.  Rick Latona recently announced that his company aeiou.com will no longer create mini-sites for people.    That leaves companies like Domain Mass Development and MiniSites competing for this market with quasi-development companies like WhyPark and DevHub.  Is there money in mini-sites?  I haven't seen much there yet.  Even full-fledged site development with great SEO does not guarantee an income stream.

My strategy for the future is to get lean and watch for occasional buying opportunities as others get lean too.  Forecasters are predicting an economic recovery in 2010, but I don't expect the domain industry to reciver that quickly. Domain parking is in bigger trouble than the economy in general, and many of us have relied on that source of "easy" income for too long.   I'll also be cutting some sales prices.  Look for more on monetizing through sales in future articles.

SedoPro members (email for an invitation) are now able to opt-in to have your domains optimized by Sedo in a beta program.  For now it appears that Sedo will test your domains for different settings (1 -click vs. 2-click landers, keyword, etc.) and make changes that will increase your revenue.  Sedo even allows you to optimize keywords for different countries, which is a great idea if you are fluent in the appropriate languages.  If you are not, then check the box and let them do the optimizing.  

To apply these beta traffic optimization features to your full portfolio:

1.    Log-in to your SedoPRO account and go to the Domain Optimizer Page

2.    Tick the “Enable Traffic Optimization for my account (Beta)” box.

Sedo has tuned-up it's parking engine and now offers optimizing based on behavioral patterns, performance monitoring, a semantic engine, and predictive targeting.  Domain portfolio owners can influence the "predictive targeting" portion by manually optimizing keywords in their accounts.

In the future you should see some very interesting things if you participate in this beta program.  Sedo sources have suggested that CPA offers, shopping portals, and destination-style pages with content may show up in future attempts to optimize domains this way.  For now you'll just see tweaks on your pages, but as these other experiments are rolled-out the beta testers will be included.

While Sedo now makes 69% if it's earnings through domain sales and only 31% through parking, they have not stopped working on ways to improve parking income. 

Tim Schumacher, CEO of Sedo commented that

“This is an excellent opportunity for Sedo to extend our parking program’s industry leading services to ParkingPanel.com’s customers.  We look forward to a smooth integration of the ParkingPanel.com brand into Sedo’s community of domain buyers and sellers. This acquisition is another example of Sedo’s commitment to sustaining growth and increasing our membership throughout the year.”

"a dedicated project manager to oversee all aspects of web design and development. turnaround time of 7 days or less...All design, research and copywriting done by professionals with years of experience.  Website content may feature up to 10 pages of on-topic text, images, videos and more.  All content on websites consists of 100% original written articles, images and feeds."

Between now and 9/20 Domain Mass Development will also give you the $99 each price for 5 domains.  They claim that their $99 domain is the equivalent of MiniSites' $325 package.  Apparently both companies offer free hosting for their mini-sites. 

MiniSites  also offers services that start at around $100.  They also show you examples of their sites, including MotorSports.com and VintageWines.com.  Domain Mass Development will send you examples on request, but they do not link to any of their sites.

I'm planning to try these services and I will report on my how it goes.  If you have worked with either company, please reply with your experiences.

Do to reasons beyond my control, I will not be responding to questions on namepros for the next few weeks/months. It was brought to my attention that my opinion was "pointless and a waste of time" by a moderator here. So I'm on strike.

If anybody wants any help from me, shoot me an email or talk to your account manager.

Apparently the original comment was made privately by a new moderator named Jason.  Ron James (RJ), the founder of NamePros has stepped in to inject some calm into the situation, but has received some criticism for creating a new thread that highlights Donny being on strike.  His influence does seem to be calming things down.

Donny has been the most active and "out there" representative of a domain parking company.  He responds quickly and honestly to questions and has inspired many newbies to improve their businesses.  Let's hope that this strike is over soon.

Session 1 - PITCHfest: Vote for the Best

Session 2 - New gTLDs: Bonanza or Bust?

Session 3 - Turning Killer Domain Names Into Killer Websites

Session 4 - Topic and panelists to be announced soon

Session 5 - Domain Names: How Prime Internet Real Estate Builds SEO and SEM Success

Will there be a party at the Playboy Mansion again? That's not clear. There are two nights where "Buses Depart for a World Famous Los Angeles Landmark."  No speakers are announced. They have also dropped the "bootcamp" format where the first day catered to beginning domainers.

Registration is only $895 through September.  The reputation that they have gained for putting on a great show should be enough to get some early sign-ups.

• The ability to choose between one-click and two-click landing pages. Most domainers like the idea of one-click pages. These pages pay the first time someone clicks on a page. This is not always the best approach. 2-click pages work better when the keyword can attract people who are looking for more than one thing. Suppose you were parking a domain with a keyword "maps." Are people looking for paper maps? Mapping software? GPS? If you look at maps.com (not a parked page) you see that they immediately offer a choice among wall maps, travel maps, globes, and classroom products. A 2-click landing page works the same way. By forcing your visitors to click a second time you may get less paid clicks, but you will get higher-paying clicks. Most Yahoo-based parking pages already work this way.
• Related Links Auto Optimization tool. Sedo is playing catch-up here. Other services, notably Domain Sponsor and the NameMedia services, have offered this for some time. Essentially this tracks what users click on and search for and uses this data to present these links more often in the future.
• Content Matching/Filtering – Sedo has made improvements that will hopefully more relevant results. This will also prevent adult ads from showing up on non-adult domains. This causes problems at times, because relevant non-adult health-related content is sometimes inappropriately tagged as "adult".

All-in-all these are positive changes that should improve your income with Sedo.

Here's a strategy to take advantage of some of these changes:

Go to the Domain Parking page and sort your Sedo domains by uniques.  Look for domains with a lot of uniques (at the top of the list) but low "earnings."  Try a 2-click lander on some of these pages or tweak the keywords.  Changes don't always show up immediately, but they seem to show up more quickly for me than they did in the past.

Because the article may be deleted I am excerpting below muchof the content that appeared on 8/10/09 at 8:30 pm:

Domaining is the practice of monetizing Internet domain names using a variety of methods and strategies. These approaches may include website development, minisite creation, affiliate marketing partnerships, domain forwarding services, domain name sales and leasing, the selling of direct sales lead via customer opt-in, the inclusion of paid business directory listings. A popular strategy to monetize domain name involves creation of websites displaying pay per click advertising. These practices often lead to domain name speculation, but the latter is also a preferred activity in itself for the majority of domaining practitioners.[citation needed] An individual who engages in domaining is referred to as a domainer.

The underlying opportunity for profiting from domaining lies in the limited supply of simple, memorable names within the most popular top-level domains (TLDs), most notably the TLD COM.[1] Major Internet service providers have been known to practice domaining by benefiting from mistyped domain names in web browsers, and redirecting the invalid domain names to advertising sites created for this purpose.[2]