Domain Name: More Than Just Squatting…
Domain name parking is one of the less reputable fast rising sectors of the Internet economy. Entrepreneurs register names that are either misspelling of common domains or generic titles. They fill them with ads from Google or Yahoo and get paid for each click.
The situation burgeoned into what is called Google arbitrage, where web pages are also filled with just enough content for search engines to find them and attract visitors to simply click the ads.
"We see search technology as publishing, as creating new kinds of content that didn't exist before," said Matthew Berk, lead search architect for Marchex, which runs the sites through a subsidiary called Open List. "What we do is well within the norms of the industry and analogous to how Google and other search engines crawl."
Other entrepreneurs are interested in creating vertical content on sites with obvious domain names. Richard Rosenblatt, the former CEO of Intermix, is running a new company called Demand Media that will use user generated content to fill such sites.
Peter Christothoulou, Marchex's chief strategy officer, acknowledged that his company's approach is a bit backwards. Most media companies put content up first and then add the advertisements. "We have a business, and now we're building a product around it," Christothoulou said.
