DomainSponsor offers domain parking services and is a subsidiary of Oversee.net. DomainSponsor is the founder and organizer of DOMAINfest, a series of conference dedicated to providing relevant information and opportunities for entities in the domain industry looking to expand their business and increase their revenue. DomainSponsor helps domain owners develop and monetize their domain names through direct navigation traffic.[1]
Oversee.net established DomainSponsor in 2001 as part of its domain services division to offer direct navigation traffic solutions to PPC advertisers. The company became operational in 2002 and helps its clients obtain higher revenue through various methods that include unlimited referrals.[2].
In 2006, the company launched DOMAINfest to cater to the needs of entrepreneurs in the domain name industry.[3] In 2009, the company expanded its operations to Europe and established its European headquarters in Germany. Joerg Schnermann serves as General Manager of DomainSponsor Europe.[4]
DomainSponsor provided PPC parking services very early on, later changing it to a more hybrid system. There are restrictions on who can sign up for their site, the criteria being that you must own more than fifty domains to apply.
DomainSponsor systems have grown increasingly sophisticated over the years, and presently allow customers to arrive at different landing pages for the same domain, allowing an analyst to check what sort of pages will optimize best. Pages can either be generic or more graphically intense, and this, combined with the ability to rotate ‘landing pages’, allows a business to optimize it’s pages in favor of those that better procure revenue and customers.
The optimization processes of the site are known to function better with domains that experience heavy traffic.
In recent years, in keeping with the rest of the industry, DomainSponsor has instituted algorithms that analyze the quality of traffic, ensuring that traffic from a site actually generates revenue.[5]
Products and Services
Domain Optimization: The core of DomainSponsor’s services are their optimization processes that ensure that landing pages generate maximum revenue. Optimization is based upon an analysis of the language and design of a landing page as well as of semantics and customer behaviors. These complex analytic systems are what make DomainSponsor’s revenue optimization process so successful.
Account Managers: A DomainSponsor client is usually assigned a dedicated account manager.
Loyalty Rewards System: DomainSponsor also has a Loyalty Rewards program, offering cash rewards for either maintaining or enhancing the amount of domains owned by a member.
Speedy Payouts: Lastly, payment by DomainSponsor is also optimized, with payment speeds that are as fast or faster than other similar sites. [6]
Dispute Resolution Policy
As a courtesy to its customers, DomainSponsor implemented a dispute resolution policy. The company is against any user who violates the intellectual property rights of others. If a domain name owner complains of trademark infringement, Domain Sponsor will investigate the issue within two business days. If the company finds that a certain user participating in the DomainSponsor System violated the complainant’s intellectual property rights, the domain name in dispute will be removed from the system. The company may also terminate domain name owners who are found to be repeat violators. Customers are advised to submit a trademark dispute notice with complete information to DomainSponsor if their trademark is violated.[7]
ICANN Involvement
DomainSponsor is an active participant in the different activities and meetings of ICANN.[8][9] The company also invites members of the ICANN community to serve as speakers during its DOMAINfest conferences.
DomainSponsor成立于2002年，总部位于加利福尼亚州洛杉矶。截至2014年4月21日，它作为Rook Media GmbH的子公司运营。
Headquarters Regions Greater Los Angeles Area, West Coast, Western US
Founded Date 2002
DomainSponsor is a domain monetization and services platform that uses semantic and behavioral testing algorithms to produce the optimal combination of parked domain page keywords, layouts, and design elements.
The platform provides keyword, mobile traffic, and landing page optimization services to domain portfolio owners, hosting companies,
website operators, domain registrars, and online performance marketing companies to maximize their revenues and profits. Its technology works across desktops and tablets as well as mobile phones.
The platform also offers a mobile application that provides internet domain owners with instant access to key financial information on their domain portfolios.
DomainSponsor was founded in 2002 and is based in Los Angeles, California. As of April 21, 2014, it operates as a subsidiary of Rook Media GmbH.
It seems like no matter what business industry you’re looking at, there’s always room for shady activities. Web hosting and the domain industry are no exceptions. However, most people are totally unaware of one such practice known as domain tasting. Domain Tasting is essentially when a someone buys a domain name for the sole purpose of seeing whether or not it can generate ad income. The domain registrant puts ads on the domain, and if the ads don’t make any money, the registrant has five days to request a refund.
There have been many big companies involved with Domain Tasting, and since they can pull off the above example on a much larger scale, they have been able to reap insane amounts of profits. This had affected us and our clients because millions of domains were getting tied up by ‘tasters’ and would appear unavailable when someone actually went to register their domain name.
To help curb this problem, since April of this year, ICANN has made their $.20 domain transaction fee non-refundable. So if a company wants to sample 50,000 domain names, for instance, then they’ll have to shell out $10,000 in registration fees even if they get a refund for the domains within the five day grace period. This change hasn’t eliminated the problem altogether, but it’s certainly helped.
Obviously domain tasting wouldn’t have gotten as out of control as it did, had it not been for the huge profits that people were reaping in. At HostGator, we don’t have that many domain registrations, since we specialize in web hosting. However, it’s still evident that there are major profits to be earned with a decent domain portfolio. One such way to monetize domain names, that we’ve explored recently, is via domain parking.
When you first buy a domain, the domain will be using the default name servers of the registrar generally. The default page you see, usually with ads all over it, is a good example of a parked page. What most people don’t realize though, is that even if they aren’t going to develop the domain right away, they can still make money from the domain while it waits to be developed.
The company we’ve been using for domain parking is DomainSponsor. Basically we use their name servers on inactive domain names in our account, and all traffic gets pointed to a domain parking page where relevant ads are displayed, giving us a percentage of the revenue made from the ads.
So just how much money can you make with Domain Parking? We were pleasantly surprised with the results.
Domain Sponsor Affiliate Check
The above check was for the month of May. We’ve been using Domain Sponsor for the last 3 months, and are consistently getting over $25,000/monthly with the domains that we have. Now these results may be unique since we do have roughly 12,000 domain names in our DomainSponsor portfolio, but many domainers have much more domains than this and can stand to make much more money.
Domain Sponsor Dashboard Stats
Overall, we’re very happy with DomainSponsor. As you can see from the above image you can easily group domains into portfolios and track advanced statistics to the exact day. Getting started with domain parking is super easy, simply sign up, and start adding your domains that are currently doing nothing to your portfolio at DomainSponsor.
Oversee.net 首席执行官黛布拉·多梅耶（Debra Domeyer）告诉Domain Name Wire，该公司并没有积极购买DomainSponsor出售。除了Rook之外，它没有与任何公司就收购进行认真的对话。
“我对[收购]非常积极，”她说。“我对Rook团队感觉非常好，我已经非常了解他们。
多梅耶说，Oversee.net 现在有大约50-60名员工。
Oversee.net has sold DomainSponsor and its domain name portfolio to Rook Media.
Rook MediaOne of the largest domain name parking companies has been acquired.
Rook Media has acquired domain name parking company DomainSponsor from Oversee.net, the companies confirmed today.
DomainSponsor is one of the oldest domain parking companies, serving customers since 2002. Rook, on the other hand, just launched in 2011. Rook was founded by former employees of NameDrive, a parking company that was acquired by KeyDrive in 2011.
Oversee.net has previously sold off a couple businesses including registrar Moniker and expired domain service SnapNames. But DomainSponsor was the company’s initial business, so the company has essentially sold off its core. Oversee.net continues to run a number of vertically focused lead generation websites, which has been the area of growth for the company in recent years.
Rook CEO Ash Rahimi told Domain Name Wire today that Rook and DomainSponsor will continue to operate as separate parking platforms for the foreseeable future.
“The customer experience will be the same as it always was,” said Rahimi. “We will be incrementally taking the best features of Rook and DomainSponsor and implementing them across platforms”.
Rahimi said the acquisition brings together the best of international monetization with Rook and U.S. monetization with DomainSponsor.
“We are the largest domain parking company by a fair margin at this point,” he said.
Rahimi says the acquisition has been several months in the making.
“It takes time,” he explained. “We’re two competitors in a pretty small industry. It’s difficult to go out there and get the usual data [necessary to evaluate an acquisition].”
The acquisition, which closed last Friday, includes Oversee.net’s owned and operated domain name portfolio. It does not include the DomainFest conference brand.
All of DomainSponsor’s approximately 30 employees have joined Rook. That doesn’t include Dwayne Walker, who has been the face of DomainSponsor at conferences in recent years. Walker will help with the transition but remain with Oversee.net.
Oversee.net CEO Debra Domeyer told Domain Name Wire that the company wasn’t actively shopping DomainSponsor for sale. It didn’t have serious conversations about an acquisition with any companies other than rook.
“I’m real positive about [the acquisition],” she said. “I feel really good about the Rook team and I’ve gotten to know them really well.”
Domeyer says that Oversee.net now has about 50-60 employees.