It’s a simple question a fellow domain investor asked me last week. Is Sedo’s only value their ability to provide domain name buyers? Sedo is a big part of my annual sales. The reputation they’ve built over the years has made them, Afternic, and Godaddy THE three public places to park your domain portfolio. The security of the transactions and the quantity of domains has made them a first stop for many domain investors and end users looking for names. But if you’re looking to actually make money parking, that’s another story.
I’m not sure anyone other than those in the “Circle of Frank” are excited about their parking revenue. I had the pleasure receiving 1 penny for three clicks the other day on a name parked at Sedo. My sarcasm on that huge amount of income is what generated the comment from my friend. He asked why I don’t just move the names to Afternic.
My opinion is this. Regardless of where I park my domains I am most likely not going to make much money. At this point in time my goal is to have my domains in view to as many potential buyers as possible. I park at Sedo because of this reason. Afternic, Godaddy, and many other parking companies provide this same opportunity but in my opinion, of the publicly available parking/sales sites, Sedo has had the best results for me. I do think this is changing. I think Godaddy and Afternic are coming on strong.
To answer the question about parking. Sedo is most likely one of the worst in the industry. I don’t know their payout rate because it really doesn’t matter how much you get when you are dividing up a bag of poop. They know that people will stay for the sales opportunity. If they were only a parking company they would be a very very small company. They are a domain sales company that happens to provide parking.
They rely on that strength to save on marketing expenses that others have to incur to promote their wares. They release their sales to a select few (still trying to get that weekly list) but other than that, they don’t buy ads. No need. But as Godaddy and Afternic come on strong and start grabbing market share will that change?
It’s hard to tell. Because we don’t get sales numbers from Godaddy we can’t tell how much their weekly sales have risen. My guess is that Godaddy has eaten into their sales numbers and the relationship between Afternic and Godaddy will shift power.
So now I put this question out there. Which platform do you use and do you think one is better than the other and why?
Domains that either attract crap traffic or have no traffic get crappy PPC regardless of where you park them. Those that are crap, you drop. Those that aren’t but still get no traffic, you develop or flip. Simple as that. Sedo performs well for me, despite losing 50% since 2008. That’s because the entire PPC sector is down, for reasons that I won’t analyze there. However, try Voodoo dot com and Bodis if you want to test out other platforms. TGIF.
I agree 100% with this post. In fact just a few days back I’ve moved my high trafficked domains AWAY from Sedo, a move I thought I would never have to do.
The vibe I’m getting from Sedo is that they want to sell domains more than anything else, obviously they stand to make more money this way since they become the only middle man involved, and there’s no split between them and another company.
I’m not here for sales at the moment, ofcourse its nice to sell a name and make some great profit, but that’s not a business model. A business model is showing a monthly profit and scaling, Sedo is not letting us small players do this.
Frank has a great sales platform, hopefuly he’ll let us minnows into his “circle of trust” in a short while so we can all prosper, this game that Sedo and co are playing is starting to get a bit boring.
Of the 3 mentioned SEDO is the most prestigious one. That’s the answer. And as a result of that SEDO attracts the best kind of customers (it’s only my assumption nothing more but look where SEX.com went to find a buyer). It’s like with german cars -quality matters
What they pay for parking my domains with them is a different story. It’s actually a kind of rip-off I’d say
J.
Sedo has gone downhill in my eyes, they upped their commission rate to 15% and offered nothing more to the customer, it was simply to subsidize all the premium domains they lost to IT IMO.
I totally agree with all posts above, especially Tom’s. Sedo raised the commission fee, because they want compensate all the wrong movments they archived last few years. Everything got worse starting with new web interface they implemented. We do not park anymore on sedo, instead that we point all traffic to our own domain portfolio and it pays out. We receiving domain buying requests every day now and happy now.
I have seen the pattern how SEDO works.
First they cut your domain parking revenue so much that you hardly get zilch. Next they even raise their commission rate rate to 15%.
Its win-win for them and lose-lose for domainers. Competition is a good thing and the more the better.
Sedo also pays out $.50-.90 on education clicks worth between $3-$7 on WhyPark and $10-21 on GoDaddy cash parking. They claim their parking company is competitive. IMO, they are holding a large portion of the parking revenue, while you get the crumbs.
The main reason to choose Sedo parking is when you park your domains to sell. They will give you a good deal on commission if the domain is parked on their platform and is at a fixed price.
For the most part, Sedo parking will never make you rich. Traffic is beginning to return back to WhyPark keyword domains again. IMO, I no longer see Panda bullying WhyPark sites.