By the end of this month, I should get payment from at least 15 different companies for very different products and services and I hope to increase it to at least 30 by the end of the year. For an online business, it is very important to know who you can trust and who you cannot. If the other party is not interested in working with you or is not reliable, it is better to look at other options or you will regret it when it is too late.

I was seriously considering working on affiliate programs, but after reading about the cookie stuffing scam, selling space at a fixed rate seems to be the best option. The worst thing you can  do is not try, there are so many money making options I regret not having experimented with earlier.

There seems to be a 50% decline in parking revenue. I had applied to Fabulous a few months , but they had rejected my application, saying that my domains were not of good quality. (most are reg fee domains) .

Since then I have experimented with almost all advertising and monetization alternatives (a large number of my websites are developed), and found some that work. So searching for other options was better for me, revenues are fairly stable and increasing.

Though dealing directly with end customers is very time consuming, in the long run, it is the most stable revenue source.

So Google is stopping its feed for domains. They seem to have been working on this for some time, I have some parked domains . Based on the replies I have got, the parking company seems to have been monitoring conversions very closely, saying that some domains which earn 5$ + per month won’t continue making money.

The good thing about domains is that you can pay only for a years renewal at a time, so you do not loose much money (if you choose your domains correctly, you make the registration fees in one month itself with little effort). I have also been experimenting with a lot of other programs, so that I earn atleast some thing from every visitor to the website. So even if the domain is blacklisted by Google, you can make money using CPM programs.

There seems to have been a reduction in domain tasting over the past few days. Most of the tasting is now done on a small scale.

Dynadot was offering free domain tasting with bulk accounts, they stopped all deletions of domains for some time. Their customers started protesting, so they re introduced it again, but a fee has to be paid. Moniker has also increased the fee for tasting. With other registrars, the deletion fees are much higher, so domain tasting is not feasible.

There seems to be a reduction in domains tasted at least for now.

“Need www.*om.in — pls give me you quotation

Hi *

did you thought about the plan for giving me *om.in

pls feel free to quote me”

Do they think I will ever consider such an inquiry? I am not interested in selling the domain, and I am “freely quoting” the sender of the mail.

Web18 buys In.com  -  The Whois data shows that the domain data was last updated on Feb 12, 2008 (as of  April 12, 2008). I own a *OM.IN domain, a Web 18 employee contacted me on Feb 13, 2008 and wanted to buy the domain.  He claimed to be “a poor student” , wanted the domain cheap, when he was actually a “Senior Interactive Designer ” at Web18.  

Indian companies will readily shell out large amounts to buy things from foreigners , but if you are an Indian in India, they expect you to sell cheap . Some of my websites have been under a DDOS attack for 2 months now, since Feb 12, I wonder if it is related. 

Another relevant  post  -  Domain revenue disappearing - when every thing is fine, it is easy to become complacent. 

When you have a single large website, you become a target of  negative SEO

I have diversified my revenues to some extent, by this year end Adsense should hopefully be a small part of my total revenues.  It is always better to work with smaller companies, you are likely to get much better support and they value your business more.

I have spent a lot of time studying the domain industry and find that most revenues seem to be from parking or sales. Parking revenues are from only a few sources and a policy change can adversely affect you.

Last year, I spent a lot of time experimenting to find non-Google, non-parking revenue sources and was able to diversify to some extent  (Yahoo is not an option if  you are non-US) . If you are not a big company, there are many disadvantages but there are a few advantages also.