If you’re like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking. I decided to give it a try to see if I could at least get these domain names to pay for their own registration fees.
Looking at the example GoDoddy shows, it appeared that a domain would easily be able to pay for itself. With any luck, my domains should generate somewhere near this level of performance. Here is how GoDaddy is promoting the service:
Make money from your domains’ parked pages! It’s easy with CashParking. Whether you have one domain or a growing portfolio, CashParking can turn those domains into a cash generator!
I start by sitting-up a Cash Parking account. The cheapest account is $3.99 per month. I was a little surprised, because I figured if there was so much profit potential in Cash Parking, I wouldn’t have to pay GoDaddy up-front to receive it. But what the heck, I’ll give it a try anyway. I pay my $3.99 for a month and move over 14 domains.
After a 5 weeks, my results are terrible.
- Number of Domains: 14
- Total Impressions: 90
- Total Clicks: 12
- Revenue: $0.99
- Customer Share of Revenue (minus monthly fee): -$3.00 (note: GoDaddy provides this stat in their Cash Parking promotional material, but not in their reports once you actually create an account.)
- Average RPM: $11.00 (Revenue per 1000 impressions)
- Average CTR: 13.33% (Click Through Rate)
- Average CPC: $0.08 (Cost per Click for an Ad)
So, at the end of one year, I stand to make about $10 from cash parking, while paying GoDaddy $47.88. Plus I still have to pay GoDaddy the annual registration fees for each domain name.
I don’t think my lack of success is because of the domain names are terrible, because some of them are not. I would list the domain names here, but I’m not going to because 1.) I don’t really endorse the content of the sites, and 2.) I’m paying GoDaddy $3.99 per month so they should be creating some traffic.
The lack of revenue is not because the domain names are brand new, because all of them have been parked at Godaddy.com for quite some time and GoDaddy has been making ad revenue from them for years and the pages are already in the search engines or where ever they should be by now.
I should state the at the monthly fee gives you Cash Parking for an unlimited number of domains, so the per-domain burden of the fee is higher the fewer domains you have. This program is really geared to having a large number of domains. But even if I did have a large number of domains, I still wouldn’t made enough to cover the annual registration fees of each domain.
One last complaint is that 4 of the domain names were flagged as “adult”. They clearly are not, in any way or permutation, adult-related domain names. But GoDaddy will not allow me to tailor the content to anything non-adult. Plus, there is no way for me to have them made “un-adult” and there is no explanation as to why they were tagged as adult in the first place. The only way I can have ads on these sites is if I allow them to display adult content, which is not something I am willing to do. The domains were registered in response to GoDaddy charging me administrative fees for “maintaining my whois information.” Perhaps GoDaddy flagged them as adult so that they could only display adult ads and not ads that may conflict with their business model. They would not allow me to use the keyword “GoDaddy”, so they are obviously looking after their own interest est in terms of content.
Conclusion
GoDaddy Cash Parking is a great way for GoDaddy to make more money from their existing customers. It’s a great way for customers to pay GoDaddy more money. It is not a money making opportunity. Perhaps if you have a large number of high-profile domain names, if you are will to do a lot of work promoting the domain names, and perhaps if you are willing to display adult-themed content, you could make money using Cash Parking. But I couldn’t and doubt the vast majority of GoDaddy customer could either.
I had my doubts about the scheme going in. It only cost me $4 to try it out, and now I know it’s not for me. For a reason I can’t fully put into words, the entire ordeal has lowered my opinion of GoDaddy. I’ve used them for years and I’ve put up with their relentless pitches for extra costly features each time you renew a domain. But something about this experience made me feel like I was been scammed. Perhaps it was the fact that some of my domains were forced to display adult ads or none at all. Perhaps it was the deceptive monthly reports that don’t show I’m losing money. Whatever the reason, I plan cancel my Cash Parking account and I also plan to forward the domains to existing website, rather than allow GoDaddy to park my domain name and display a GoDaddy logo and lots of ads (from which no revenue is shared with me.)
Update: I switched to Google AdSense for domains, which is a free service. After getting the GoDaddy.com DNS settings adjusted (using the Google instructiosn), it works well and costs nothing. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to cover the annual domain renewal fees.
Being new to domaining I too got suck into Cashparking, even moving up to the Premium account at 80% share. My initial plans were to park the new names I was aquiring on EBay and see if they obtained any traffic.
I have to agree to your summary, CashParking is great for
GoDaddy. After reading the fine print, I see that there is even a fee for withdrawing from CashParking and you lose any revenue you have accumulated that has not been paid out, since they pay a month after revenue generation.
I have since learned of other parking services and am moving from CashParking. Live and Learn!
Overall, unless you hav some really great names, generating a ton of traffic and clicks, I do not see how CashParking will profit anyone besides GD.
Do you know another domain parking service? I hear about sedo and park.com. What do you think about them ? I have some domain but not develop it and i think to park them.
I haven’t researched any other services; hopefully someone else can offer some insight.
I have been looking into some of the other services and there is new one I just sign-up with, Domain Embarking, I only have one site there so far, cheapdomainsregisters.com. I have a few nade at Sedo, but most are not that great, so i am looking to develop them myself. One good source for reviews of Parking services can be found at NameMonetizer.com and ParkQuick.com. Good luck.
The godaddy.com model is the worst model out there. There are a number of sites out there that offer free parking services and very low payouts. I have tested a number of them and so far Namedrive.com is offering the very best payouts. Sedo seems to be the most popular but really is pretty low on performance and pay scale from my reviews. Check out more on my site if you want to learn more.
I read your article and found it to be very informative and entertaining. By accident and on a “whim”, I purchased 5 domains on godaddy for $32.99. Not really knowing what I was going to do with the domains, the following day I opted for the CashParking feature they offer. I’m very new and ignorant about the hole domain craze and how to make money from it. But you know what? I made money within four days. At the rate I’m going, I look to make about $365 a year. To me, not a bad return. I also opted for not having adult content or websites on my parked domain. I think they may be a new feature they have added. Yes, godaddy can nickel and dime you to death with he vast amount of upsales, upgrades and upcharges — but I say no to most (99%) and move on.
Bill, Congrats! You must have some prety good names, which is guess is the most important key to domain parking. As I said, some of my domains have done really well with Godaddy, one rason why I have not moved them all; as long you are getting that kind of return it would be smart to stick with it, but do keep your eyes open to other services and methods, you could be making more. Peace
Hi! I need your help. I have a Cash Parking account at Godaddy. I have same results as Carlton Bale:
Every month 4$ fee but no money, almast no click…
The question is: How can I cancel my Cash Parking account? I cant find this option.
Thank You for your help.
Zoli: Just look around Godaddy.com or read their help pages. I had no issues deleting the CashParking account.
GoDaddy sucks period! My husband tried them out, and without telling him they knocked several domains of his out of their system so that when you go to the domains (sites) it says “Site is unavailable.”
After ages online and on the phone with tech support, their answer – “Those domains were getting too much traffic.” No, he was not clicking himself – they had his IP number so they knew that. They said he was not allowed to advertise those domains on any other sites he has or link to those domains from anywhere else. You’re also not allowed to submit them to search engines. How is anyone supposed to find them???
GoDaddy’s cash parking is a cash grab on their part – they’re scam artists!
WhyPark.com looks promising…we’re looking into it. I saw a good review by a site that rated various domain parking services.
Go Daddy sucks. Cancellation fee is $15.00. I have several “good” names that Google has bidding @ $3.5 – $5.00/click, yet never got any traffic. They currently have some of my money, I didn’t meet $ amount for check. They are unsure how they are going to get the funds to me. I going to move my domains as soon as this issue is resolved.
Yes, it doesn’t make good business sense for anyone to pay GoDaddy for the privilege of allowing them to make money on your web site. If it is profitable , why are they charging you a fee?
GoDaddy, at first, wouldn’t allow me to register at their site, because my web-site was “associated with porn.” The domain name was not even close to anything related to porn, and neither was any of the content. I was outraged. I wrote an angry letter and sent it to them via the US Post Office, and got a nice reply soon after from them denying any knowledge of anything, etc., and welcoming me to their website.
GoDaddy cashparking leaves a lot to be desired.
See below for a series of articles. The company earned $1.6 million in cashparking revenue – for itself. It’s likely that it will not share any of it with its customers.
http://thebigretort.blogspot.com/2008/05/godaddy-cashparking-and-clickfraud_30.html
Thanks for the review, I appriciate it.
Yeah I was thinking of trying them last year myself. And I also tried Google Adsense for Domains. Anyways, both are not worth it because you lose control of the domain and content. Plus they get a percentage of your earnings.
It’s $4 a month and you only earn 60% of revenue. That’s crazy.. and that’s PER domain.
I think a better way is using http://www.instantadsensemachine.com and you earn all the revenue, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up and you dont have to touch it again, and plus you keep all the revenue. You can use it with adsense, affiliates, etc. Easy as heck.
Go check out the free demo at the site or download the free trial.
I’ve had a similar experience to the one listed above – 9 domains, $0.72 after 4 weeks… I’ve just obtained some more domains for a project I’ll be working on so I’ll see how well they do, but so far I’m not even going to recoup my monthly fee. It’s also worth noting that only 2 domains are actually making any revenue at all…
Oh, and to correct the obvious shill above (yes you, Scott), the monthly fee is NOT per domain – the $4 flat monthly fee stays the same whether you have 2 domains or 200. There’s enough legitimate criticism of this program without making stuff up.
I’ve tried godaddy’s cashparking years ago when it first came out. Back then, I confirmed it with them by phone that it was OK for me to promote the cashparking page. It was OK with them at that time but now I cannot find any domain parking company which allows promotion of the domain while parked with them. I first tried promoting the site with pay per click at a one penny bid to drive traffic to the site, and at that time all I could get back in return was 50% of each dollar I spent on advertising. For a very short time I started to see about a 4000% increase in my revenue, and I think it was due to an article marketing campaign I started. As soon as my revenue surged my pay per click I was receiving was reduced from about 11 cents a click to 1cent a click, and I stopped promoting it. All in all, every attempt to make money online has been a futile endeavor for me.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I figured, I’d register my domains with GoDaddy and then host and everything else with other vendors. I had a feeling their CashParking comparison was aggressively optimistic since I doubt most average users have 100 domains. If they were actually making money from the traffic, they’d be happy to have you spending your time and money promoting your domains. The reality is that they want your money without having to provide anything, not even a bit of bandwidth.
VERY INFORMATIVE, Thank you, I believe you just saved me a few bucks. Is the only way that you are expected to generate clicks, is for folks to enter your URL directly? How do they expect you to be found?
I tried GoDaddy Cash parking as well and had the same results. I have ended up switching to Google adsense, which parks my domains and has revenue sharing for free.
I switched to Google AdSense as well. After getting the GoDaddy.com DNS settings adjusted (using the Google instruction), it works well and costs nothing. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to cover the annual domain renewal fees.
I have used XINNET for the past 2 years. I fedup with those service I have lot of issues with the websites. Now i transfered to unlimitedgb now it is working fine. http://www.unlimitedgb.com
Thanks for the empowerment! Good luck everybody!
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