While it is true that there is nothing new about domain leasing, in the decade I've spent in this industry I've never seen interest in leasing higher than it is right now. Industry pioneer Rick Schwartz has become a major leasing proponent through his new JointVentures.com platform, Escrow.com now offers a domain holding service tailor made for leasing domains and a lot of domain owners are jumping on the bandwagon.

I started offering a lease to own option on my own domains about a year ago and have been very pleased with the results. With several leases now in effect I have a steady new revenue stream that is helping offset the decline in PPC revenue that has been a sore point among domain owners for several years now.

The latest major operator to make a big move into leasing is NoktaDomains - a well-known company based in Ankara, Turkey that has made frequent appearances on our domain

Globe for lease image from Bigstock

name sales charts over the years. Nokta's Arif Şengören went so far as to say, " Since PPC revenues are decreasing every day and minisites are useless, domain leasing will be the rescue of monetization of domain names."

"At the end of 2011, we were looking for alternative techniques to increase our PPC revenues," Şengören said. "One day, one of our clients asked to lease one of our Turkish domain names. That offer shed light on the new monetization technique that we were looking

for and we aggressively started our leasing operation in the beginning of 2012. We first started leasing our Turkish names, approximately 5,000 domains, as the leasing offers were coming for those names. After leasing Turkish names for three months, we decided to ask our customers whether they would be interested in leasing English names, as we have 25,000 English names available for lease. The offers were amazing for leasing English names!," Şengören declared.

"After seeing this great demand for leasing, we got one of the best attorneys in the domain industry, Paul Keating, to prepare the optimal leasing agreement for both our customers and our company. With this agreement, our leasing revenues and the number of domains leased increased more than 200%," Şengören said.

Nokta initially handled their lease arrangements  through email exchanges but they recently set up the process online so customers can lease domains through the NoktaDomains.com website. "There are more than 60,000 domains that are available to lease now," Şengören told us. "The monthly lease fees start at just $15. The most premium names like CreditScores.com and HandTools.com are also available for leasing. All customers have to do is visit our leasing page to pick domains for their projects. They can download the leasing agreement, and start leasing domains right away."

Attorney Paul Keating crafted
Nokta's domain lease agreement

While a lot of people look at leasing as a replacement for lost PPC revenue, Nokta likes leasing as an alternative to sales that is attractive to everyone involved. "With leasing our customers can minimize their expenditures and their risks when they start their projects. They do not have to 

Arif Şengören
NoktaDomains.com

pay a lot of money to to start their projects, or wait until they prepare their budget to buy a domain name. If the projects are successful, our customers can still buy their domain name at a pre-determined price in the leasing agreement. We offer that set price option in our lease so customers do not have to worry that the sale price of the domain name will increase after they launch their projects," Şengören said.

"Our system is well designed to offer customers automatic payments via PayPal. They can also make payments in advance and we offer a 10% discount on a yearly basis for advance payments. We believe that 2013 is a new era for monetization, and this will be accomplished by domain leasing. Leasing offers a win-win situation to both domain companies and our customers so we are already preparing to launch the second version of our leasing platform very soon,"  Şengören concluded.