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Domain name parking will soon be an integral
part of search engine result-rankings. This convergence will benefit
all stakeholders: search engine users, domain name owners, search
engine service providers, search engine users, and domain name traffic
aggregators.
To a user, a parked domain is a source of information
related to the keywords in the domain name; namely, ranked website-links
with descriptions of their services. That is precisely what search
engine results provide.
Parking focuses on domain names that generate
clicks, which is achieved by placing advertiser links on a Web page.
Every time a visitor clicks on any of the links the advertiser pays
the domain name owner a pay-per-click (PPC) fee. Individual domain
owners can sign-up with a traffic aggregator that hosts their domain
names, manages advertiser links, and pays a commission to the owners.
To analyze the value-added role of parked domain
names, consider two types of aggregators: experts in the field of
the domain name keywords and mass aggregators. Assume that the objective
of both groups is to select and rank advertiser links so as to maximize
click revenue.
The expert group provides valuable information
to a parked domain name user. The expertise is reflected in the
ranking, which might be an individual expert's opinion or collective
group expertise of the keyword-related Web community, augmented
with an expert's notes. Thus, search engines should include such
sites in their indexing algorithms.
Primarily due to management cost of a large portfolio
of traffic domain names and the fact that often the keywords and
classifications assigned by the human judges are inadequate or incomplete,
the role of experts is diminished in favor of an automated learning
mechanism. The ranking update mechanism can be based on maximizing
click revenue. That's the objective of PPC search engines like Overture
and meta-search sites such as DogPile and MetaCrawler. Meta-search
sites can experiment with various revenue-maximizing rankings based
on description and vendor name recognition, while the former ranking
criterion is dictated by advertisers' keyword bid amount and their
associated description.
Thus, we predict the following impact of the convergence on the
stakeholders:
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Independent aggregators: They will
either be acquired by search engine operators, enter into agreements
with search engine operators to use their technology, or go
out of business.
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Owners: With improved result-rankings
on parked domain names and on search engine results, owners
will share the benefits of increased revenue with search engine
operators, as owners have some market power in moving their
portfolio of domains to the highest paying search engine.
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Search Engine Users: Consumers will
benefit from improved result quality on search engine pages
and on parked domain names.
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Search Engine Companies: They will
benefit from increased revenue as a result of improved result
ranking that increases customer satisfaction, which in turn
increases traffic. Additional revenue per user as a result of
incorporating performance feedback generated by various ranking
experiments on parked domain names, revenue from licensing the
ranking technology to parking aggregators, and new sources of
advertising revenue generated by parked domain names.
Thus, the convergence of domain name parking and
search engines is a win-win strategy to all stakeholders.
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