Would you park your domain for charity?
I know a lot of you, like me, have a ton of domains that were meant for a project but are now sitting unused. Instead of leaving your domain parked on your registrars default parking page, or a page like Sedo, would you park your domain for charity? I figure it would be an easy way to give back so I want to create a service where you park your domain and anyone who lands on it sees a landing page with a list of charities they can click through to (or possibly a single random charity, or redirects to a charity, not sure yet whats best). It would be completely free and non-profit of course.
Is this something you'd use and if so what would you like to see in a service like this? (list of charities vs. one at a time, choose your own charities, still be able to sell your domain, analytics, etc.)
I like the idea and would probably take part.
I think the domain owner should be able to choose/exclude charities.
There should still be reference that the domain is for purchase. Maybe optional that a % of the selling price goes to charity?
Complementary could be that the service provides free templates for owner willing and being able to set up their own parked website.
But of course it remains to be seen tested if/how charities would really benefit. How many visitors would donate or support the charity otherwise?
Another angle be could be that there are 'normal' ads on the parked page but that that (part of) the income goes to charity.
Maybe that money helps the charity more than a link?
And advertisers might be willing to spend more of they get a reputational bonus that their money spent goes directly to charity?
Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah choosing/excluding charities should definitely be a feature. I'm thinking I'll just provide a list and users can opt in/out of them on their profile and request new ones be added. Not sure if I'll allow individuals to add their own manually because I wouldn't want the platform to be seen as supporting some shadier organizations.
The whole thing will be open source so anyone that wants to host themselves or branch in a different direct should be able to pretty easily spool up their own version.
I agree, not sure if this would really be beneficial to charities until I test it. I figure if advertisers are willing to pay to be put on landing pages then there has to be some value to click-throughs, it's just not known if those clicks are as valuable to charities as they are other businesses.
Other streams of revenue like ads and facilitating domain sales are definitely in mind but would also make it a bit less transparent as to where the money is going, so that's something I'm just going to push down the line for now. But I'll at least make it possible for the domain owner to indicate the domain is for sale and facilitate contact for purchase.
Seems like a good initiative, but would it affect the domain SEO in a negative way?
I like the idea also and happy to take part
Interesting. Maybe. I'd worry a little bit that it would build up some bad SEO that I'd regret if/when I ever did something with those domains.