Innovation Interactive Unveils Domain Monetization Tool

Livedoor's Innovation Interactive today is expected to release Siteparker, a tool that allows companies with portfolios of generic domain names to monetize their sites with targeted ads.

The company's strategy is to offer the product to companies that have parked on a wide variety of "parked" domain names that consumers are likely to directly navigate to, instead of going through search engines.

Innovation Interactive, parent company of 360i and SearchIgnite, owns roughly 20,000 domains--including, for example, FancyFlowers.com, and 42inchplasmatv.com. The product's algorithm constructs a site on the domain using HTML templates, and populates the site with paid listings. "It's a great opportunity, from our perspective, to get ahold of some fantastic inventory and be able to produce some pretty good end-result revenue solutions for the domain holder," said Will Margiloff, CEO of Innovation Interactive, which has used Siteparker internally for the last six months. "We aggregate and optimize different templates combined with different keywords, so there's the highest possible yield on what's been traditionally called parked domain names."

Innovation's announcement comes the same week that former MySpace.com head Richard Rosenblatt unveiled plans to launch Demand Media Inc., a firm focused on monetizing generic domain names in a very similar fashion. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Rosenblatt's enterprise has already acquired 150,000 domain names, and is looking to buy up more.

Domain parking grew out of "cybersquatting"--in which speculators purchased domain names--often trademarked terms they thought would be likely to be in high demand--and then attempted to sell the URLs to the trademark owner. In the late 1990s, Congress prohibited the bad-faith registration of trademarked domains. But since then, with the advent of contextual targeting--and the prospect of making money by selling ads, rather than ransoming domain names--the practice of domain parking has gained respectability.

Mark Petersen, spokesman for Marchex--a firm that also is working to monetize a large portfolio of generic domain names--said that the domain parking space is headed toward creating not only ad networks, but content networks on these sites. "It's very early yet. Our long-term commitment is to evolve our portfolio of domains into a network of locally and vertically focused sites," he said. "The market has changed and evolved quite a bit, and we think there's substantial room for innovation in the space--developing these sites into much more robust destinations."

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