Does Domain Parking Work?

So what exactly is domain parking? Parking your domain is an advertising practise used predominantly by domain registrars and internet entreprenuers to earn income from type-in traffic to an underdeveloped website. The url will usually resolve to a page consisting of nothing but adsense ads or links to affiliate programs. There is usually no useful information of any value to the user who usually clicks on one of the links just to get away from the page. The domain owner is usually paid based on the number of clicks and the resulting benefit derived from such clicks.
Is it possible to earn money from domain parking? Yes it is! Some domainers have portfolios of thousands of such sites that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Venture Capital funds. One Canadian domainer has managed to sign an agreement with the government of Cameroon. Cameroon domain names end with a ".cm". Many internet users mistakenly type in ".cm" instead of ".com" and all of the unregistered URLs resolve to a parked domain page consisting of paid links. This person is reported to make millions of dollars each quarter, his share for assisting the Cameroon government monetize this phenomenon!
My personal experiments with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty miserable. I had five domains with Sedo for a 2 year period and I made on average 1 cent per month! Not even enough to cover the expense of the domain name registration fee each year. GoDaddy was far worse. I had to to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your site there. I had 1 site for several months but I was unable to make enough money to even reimburse the cost of this fee, even though it wasn't a lot to begin with. I guess that if you're a bulk domainer with thousands of sites, you might get a lot more traction than I did. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Before you think that you'll jump in and buy 5-6 domains and snowball your domain parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the show. It's now a very cut-throat playing field and there are tens of thousands of experienced domainers struggling to earn income from domain parking. All of the 2 & 3 letter domains are all gone and so are most of the 4 letter domains too! Getting type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Public firms getting in on the action, there's more than enough money being spread around to buy up all the possible dictionary words and their possible permutations and combinations.
However, you don't need to totally give up on the concept of domain parking. There are still one or two ways to make some money. Some of them involve creating MFA (made for adsense) domains that have a little amount of content which draws organic traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is substantially more involved than regular domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are ways to automate this process, but many of these processes require a bit of cash outlay for software tools that all generate indentical duplicate content for everyone. Creating unique content is really very critical for ranking high in the search engines and getting their traffic. There are ways to automate this process without spending any money but thats a new topic for another article.