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Park
it, develop it, sell it
or try something new?
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By
Ron Jackson
For years now the primary options for domain monetization
have been to park your names and rely on pay per click (PPC
revenue), develop your names and run ads from networks like Google
AdSense or Yahoo Publisher (or better yet sell directly
to advertisers), or to sell the domain for a profit.
Parking is the easiest route, but going down that road may mean
leaving a lot of potential revenue on the table. Good development
work and marketing can increase profits dramatically but development
is labor intensive (or costly if you hire someone else to do the
job). If you can find a buyer, selling is an easy way to cash in,
but you then have to say goodbye to your asset and potential future
price appreciation forever.
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Leasing domains has also been an option but due
to the intricacies of lease contract negotiations and the legwork
required to match interested advertisers with domains related to
their business, it has been an option that only a handful of domain
owners have used. A new company, LeaseThis.com,
seeks to change all of that and make leasing a primary
monetization option that will be as simple to use as today’s
popular domain parking programs.
| The company has already lined up national
advertisers who are looking for domains to lease and is now
accepting domain listings from portfolio owners to meet that
demand. Company CEO Jonathan Boswell and his staff
have spent most of the past year criss-crossing the country
to build relationships with major ad agencies, owners of
global brand names and other potential advertisers. After
months of pitching the value of premium domains as an
advertising platform to all of the right people, they have
finally rolled out their shiny new monetization vehicle.
LeaseThis.com, co-founded by Boswell, Ammar Kubba
and Kevin Vo, officially launched their site January
19th with an array of real estate domains that are
available for lease now. Other categories are slated to
follow soon, including shopping, finance, travel and
entertainment to name just a few. LeaseThis.com says their
patent pending technology that makes the Internet's premium
domains available to individuals and businesses around the
globe will be the bridge that connects domain owners directly
with advertisers. |
Jonathan
Boswell
CEO, LeaseThis.com |
“Domain owners will provide our inventory and we will work with
them on setting appropriate lease pricing,” Boswell said. “Their
domains will always be making money because we will have them on a
PPC program of their choice at times when they are not being leased
by an advertiser. There are a lot of variables so we can’t predict
exactly how much more a specific domain might earn at LeaseThis.com,
but we guarantee it will earn more than it will make on PPC alone.
For some domains it may be three times more, for others it could be
ten times PPC revenue or even higher.”
Domain owners will have the final say on pricing, the length of
lease terms and other issues that are important to them. Currently,
the minimum lease term starts at one month and can be increased in
30-day increments as far out as the domain owner wants to go. You
can choose to offer lease arrangements with an option to buy or set
a price to sell outright if you wish. LeaseThis.com also plans to
offer brokerage services to those interested in selling to end
users.
LeaseThis.com has a formula for filtering domain portfolios so
they can quickly identify and feature names that will be more
attractive to advertisers. The domains will be ranked so that
companies looking for a name to lease can look at premium names,
browse through a middle tier, or search all names in the
LeaseThis.com database.
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Rob
Grant
President
RealEstateDirectory.com |
Rob Grant played a major role in
getting LeaseThis.com out of the gate by being the first
person to place a premium portfolio in the system. He is the
President of RealEstateDirectory.com,
a company that owns a massive portfolio of highly targeted
real estate domains. “I wanted to help create a new
revenue channel,” Grant said. “I did not want to remain
dependent on Google and Yahoo (the main providers of PPC
revenue) and this looked like a very smart alternative. For
a vertical portfolio like mine is is especially good because
it is possible to forge a direct advertiser relationship for
thousands of domains at once.”
Grant accompanied Boswell and Kubba to the National Association of Realtors
convention in New Orleans in November and the trio
said real estate agents who visited their booth were
extremely enthused after seeing a demonstration of the
company’s platform. Grant’s HollywoodRealEstate.com
was one of the sample pages that immediately grabbed
realtors attention and opened their eyes to how a highly targeted
domain name could broaden their reach. |
Screenshot
from HollywoodRealEstate.com
That page is built on one of the templates that
LeaseThis.com makes available to domain owners who list with them. Kubba said that advertisers love it because they get exclusivity on the page, click fraud is not an issue and the flat monthly leasing fee makes dependable budgeting a snap.
You’ll note that the top half of the
HollywoodRealEstate.com page features the domain name so the
owner’s brand value remains intact while it is leased. The
advertiser’s site is presented below the domain name. "We also add long-term value to the domain name by incorporating search engine optimization into our template pages, which we expect will build up residual traffic over time,"
Kubba said.
Of course, some advertisers may want to simply lease a high
traffic domain and redirect that traffic to an existing site, rather
than use a LeaseThis.com template, but it is up to the domain owner
whether or not they want to allow redirection to a page that would
not highlight their domain name.
| As a start up operation, the main thing
LeaseThis.com wants to do now is beef up their inventory
of domain names available for lease. You can add your
portfolio through the simple sign up procedure on their
site. Kubba, who is already well-known in the domain
business as the COO at TrafficZ.com,
said you can choose the parking company to use when your
domains are off lease. If you are a TrafficZ customer, he noted that you will have some added benefits and functionality, but the PPC aspect of the system is not exclusive to
TrafficZ.
Grant noted that LeaseThis.com could open up a whole new
avenue for domain owners that has not been available before.
“For example, brandable domains that don’t make much in
PPC revenue could be very attractive to some advertisers,”
Grant said. “We need to break away from the past and push
to the next level and unlock the value in domains.”
Kubba added that if more domains
are moved to leasing that will lower the amount of PPC
inventory which should push bid prices up, helping that
industry in the long run as well. |
Ammar
Kubba
Co-Founder
LeaseThis.com |
You may think that the odds of getting many of your names leased is
relatively small but Kubba doesn’t think so. “We actually have more
demand than we do domain inventory,” Kubba said. “Most
professionals have more domains than they will ever be able to
develop, so they owe it to themselves to test this system and see
for themselves how much more they can earn than they are getting
through PPC.”
Boswell and Kubba both emphasized that their main goal was to keep
the system very simple for advertisers and domain owners, taking the
mystery and difficulty out of the domain leasing process. They plan
to continue adding functionality and features to the system and say
that within a year the platform will have advanced dramatically.
This is just the first step, but for domain owners, it looks like a step in the right direction.*****
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