Pros & Cons Site Development vs Parked Domain

Many domain name owners are now saying the smart money in 2010 is on website development.

It appears most everyone is saying development is best but the fact is it can be much tougher to get revenue vs a ppc parked page.

Several reasons for that including the fact Click-thru-rates (CTR) is often 4 or 5 times better on a parked page which means the developed site will need 4 or 5 time more traffic to earn the same revenue, assuming the Earnings-per-click (EPC) is about the same comparing say Adsense/YPN vs the major parking firms.

With that said, a nice advantage the developed site has is the ability for site traffic to increase (but that can easily take many months or even years), whereas the parked domain is unlikely to ever get more traffic.

I have more developed sites vs parked domains so I also believe strongly in development but the strength of the keyword name is a big factor, imo. In addition, development involves vast amounts of time and work, including the site/domain server setup, content, hosting, seo work, site maintenance and monitoring, not to mention the hosting cost and time involved and many months or years of waiting for traffic to slowly build-up over time.

Keep the following example in mind if you are developing a good keyword name which gets say 100 typein visits/mo and earns say $2.80/mo at parking (based on 20% CTR and .14c EPC). Once you make it a developed site you will start-out with approx the same 100 typein visits but more often than not your CTR will drop to roughly 4% (or even lower) which means your revenue will decline to just .56c vs $2.80 on parking.

That typical example scenario in-effect means your traffic will need to skyrocket to 500 visits/mo to equal the same $2.80/mo revenue when parked. Can you imagine the time and work involved increasing your traffic from 100/mo to 500/mo!