I’m talkin about the plethora of sites that don’t really seem to do anything other than give you a way to click someplace else. There’s no content, just links. My questions are:
do they make money?
If so, how?
If I own some URL that are not being used, would it be wise to turn them into sites like this?
How would I go about doing so?
What are the expenses involved?
Is it worth it?
Is the second example substantially different than the other two?
Some, not all.
People clicking the ad links.
It might not hurt.
Monthly web hosting can be had for ~$5 a month. The domain is about $8 a year.
It can be lucrative.
Sure, it doesn’t appear to be capitalizing on the misspelling of the intended domain names. Some folks grabbed generic domains that turned out to be specific. Some got lucky. A buddy of mine got into this a few years ago, he had over 1000 domains going.
ETA: Once in awhile someone will come along and want to buy the domain name from them, a pretty significant profit can be realized there as well if the right offer comes along.
How does one set up the mechanism(s) to get paid? Who does the paying? And do you know the easiest way to go about creating a page that looks like that, and adding all the links?
You will need an ad broker or the like. Examples include Google AdSense, AdBrite, and any number of the fly by night brokers that will happily accepted malware infected advertising and push it to their content network (example, whoever the SDMB uses as a broker)
ETA: the last part may have been a bit snarky but the point stands and it’s factually based, imo.
This is called domain parking. There are companies that make it easy to try to generate revenue from parked domains like: parked.com or sedo.com. If you set up an account and point your domain to one of these companies, they create instant fake sites with ads and stock photos based on keywords. They do this for free but take a percentage of the ad revenue.
Most of these domains, like StraitDope.com, are completely worthless but apparently generic parked domains like camera.com have a lot of traffic and make money. Infinging typo domains like microseft.com are illegal and get shut down when they are discovered.
The search boxes return links which will generate revenue for the domain owner when clicked. They don’t normally return useful results like Google does.
I don’t know how these “near miss” type sites perform, but I had a dozen or so domains for businesses I was thinking about starting (and may still someday) that I parked for a few months with Sedo, and made a total of about 20 cents from all of them. Since it was such a small amount, I was never actually paid.
So obviously, that doesn’t even cover the cost of keeping the domains registered.
Those sites will not cover the cost of the registering the domain because they have no traffic. For example, compare Alexa’s traffic stats of straitdope.com and straightdope.com:
Alexa is IMO full of crap. They don’t have any special way of knowing the real traffic stats for a site. I think there is some sort of toolbar they get people to install that monitors their surfing, but only a small fraction of visitors to any given site would be using the Alexa toolbar. So at most they know a sample of visitors.
For example, Alexa says our traffic is up like 30% (no it isn’t I have the server logs) and it said the #1 search term leading people to our site was “cowboy boots” or something like that, that term doesn’t even exist on our site.
There was an article about this on reddit not too long ago. From what I remember, the guy ran a little typo domain business and bought hundreds of domains. I’m not sure who his ad broker was, but it was profitable for him. Its a pretty sleezy way to make a living. Those ads direct people to sites that have warnings from fake anti-virus, do a lot of weird javascript stuff, play loud video ads, etc.
From what I recall, this was just one strategy in his overall money making scheme. He also had some kind of commissions/affiliate thing going on. So if you did click on a camera ad then there would be a code in the url that told the operator where you came from. If you actually bought a camera from there then the typo-domain guy got a dollar.
The heyday of the typo/affiliate/blogspammer might be over as the FTC will require bloggers to say if they are being paid for their content:
Maybe this guy? The man who owns the Internet Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire. By Paul Sloan, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large / May 22 2007
The company I work for does have significant traffic, 10MM+ people every month. We are constantly shutting down sites with soundalike names. (Yes, it’s illegal, because they are deliberately infringing on our brand. Not sure that’s the right legal words though) They can make a fair amount of money. Consumer types our name wrong and goes to one of these sites. They click on a link, often a link to our correct URL. Whatever link they click on is a Google link, and the recipient of that click has to pay for the click.
I know at least one guy was making “tens of thousands each month”.