Stephen
01-13-2005, 03:19 AM
i can understand that people are miffed about Dotster's move to capitalize on your domain names. i have a good idea of what Dotster is thinking because i currently work for an internet company that produces the kind of (advertising loaded) landing pages that appear on your new Dotster .info sites (though in Dotster's case they appear to be using Google's domain parking service to get the advertiser links on the page).
Dotster is counting on most people being too lazy to do anything with these extra .info domains. if you register them, Dotster makes money. if you ignore them Dotster makes money too through the advertising (supposing your .info domain gets any traffic). however you can play the same game as Dotster yourself. this is because you can redirect the traffic going to those sites, and you can point visitors to your own advertising-loaded landing pages and collect the money yourself.
how do you do this? well there are several companies that offer similar services. it doesn't cost you anything to sign up. you register, then either use their name servers, or simply redirect your new domains to the appropriate landing page. i'll demonstrate using links to the company i work for (of course). in this case there is NO requirement to use our name servers, you can just redirect.
if interested, you can sign up for the Domain Sponsor service here: Domain Sponsor (http://www.domainsponsor.com/tracker/ref.php?ref_id=2077&s=0) (yes, my referrer id is in that URL)
once you are signed up you can use a simple site redirection to a landing page on the Domain Sponsor system. here's the URL i would use to redirect to my new computerized-shoes.info site:
http://landing.domainsponsor.com/?a_id=2077&domainname=computerized-shoes.info
check the status bar at the bottom of the browser page to see the full URL. you'll see the link includes an a_id (which identifies me) and a domain name. although my computerized-shoes.info site is not currently redirected to the URL shown above, you can nonetheless see what would appear if it was redirected and you simply typed www.computerized-shoes.info into the browser bar.
now, when you go look at that page you'll see advertising links for all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to what you might expect to find on a site supposedly about computerized shoes. but as people visit and perform their own searches, that information is captured and revelant keywords start to appear (this keyword optimization process takes days to weeks depending on how much traffic one gets). after a while you get a site that looks more like this one (the .com version that has been around a couple of weeks): Computerized Shoes Optimized (http://landing.domainsponsor.com/?a_id=2077&domainname=computerized-shoes.com)
of course, none of this means much if you don't expect to receive any traffic on these domains. but if you do, you can collect 50 percent of the revenue the advertisers pay to have their adverts appear on your pages.
if Dotster hadn't got people talking about this subject, i'd not have brought it up. but as people are talking about it...
also i can vouch for the integrity of the people behind the Domain Sponsor service. so if you want to deprive Dotster of the advertising revenue and pick up some of it yourself, Domain Sponsor is a good option.
if people have questions about the service i can provide a few, though i am fairly new to it myself. in general, if you have domains that you currently don't have time to develop, and you want to capitalize on that untapped traffic (if there is any) then parking your sites at a place like Domain Sponsor isn't a bad idea.
Dotster is counting on most people being too lazy to do anything with these extra .info domains. if you register them, Dotster makes money. if you ignore them Dotster makes money too through the advertising (supposing your .info domain gets any traffic). however you can play the same game as Dotster yourself. this is because you can redirect the traffic going to those sites, and you can point visitors to your own advertising-loaded landing pages and collect the money yourself.
how do you do this? well there are several companies that offer similar services. it doesn't cost you anything to sign up. you register, then either use their name servers, or simply redirect your new domains to the appropriate landing page. i'll demonstrate using links to the company i work for (of course). in this case there is NO requirement to use our name servers, you can just redirect.
if interested, you can sign up for the Domain Sponsor service here: Domain Sponsor (http://www.domainsponsor.com/tracker/ref.php?ref_id=2077&s=0) (yes, my referrer id is in that URL)
once you are signed up you can use a simple site redirection to a landing page on the Domain Sponsor system. here's the URL i would use to redirect to my new computerized-shoes.info site:
http://landing.domainsponsor.com/?a_id=2077&domainname=computerized-shoes.info
check the status bar at the bottom of the browser page to see the full URL. you'll see the link includes an a_id (which identifies me) and a domain name. although my computerized-shoes.info site is not currently redirected to the URL shown above, you can nonetheless see what would appear if it was redirected and you simply typed www.computerized-shoes.info into the browser bar.
now, when you go look at that page you'll see advertising links for all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to what you might expect to find on a site supposedly about computerized shoes. but as people visit and perform their own searches, that information is captured and revelant keywords start to appear (this keyword optimization process takes days to weeks depending on how much traffic one gets). after a while you get a site that looks more like this one (the .com version that has been around a couple of weeks): Computerized Shoes Optimized (http://landing.domainsponsor.com/?a_id=2077&domainname=computerized-shoes.com)
of course, none of this means much if you don't expect to receive any traffic on these domains. but if you do, you can collect 50 percent of the revenue the advertisers pay to have their adverts appear on your pages.
if Dotster hadn't got people talking about this subject, i'd not have brought it up. but as people are talking about it...
also i can vouch for the integrity of the people behind the Domain Sponsor service. so if you want to deprive Dotster of the advertising revenue and pick up some of it yourself, Domain Sponsor is a good option.
if people have questions about the service i can provide a few, though i am fairly new to it myself. in general, if you have domains that you currently don't have time to develop, and you want to capitalize on that untapped traffic (if there is any) then parking your sites at a place like Domain Sponsor isn't a bad idea.