I recently came upon a blog post on another domain blog in which domain parking-alternative company WhyPark (a Parked.com company) was recommended as a mechanism for monetizing domain names.  A year and a half ago, this may have seemed like good advice.  However, as someone who has been a client of WhyPark since shortly after the company’s inception (and long before Parked.com acquired it), I find the notion of domain professionals continuing to plug this service without offering an in-depth review increasingly irresponsible.  This is coming from a person who has previously written about the WhyPark service in a favorable light, and one who hoped to see the company succeed as much as did anyone with no direct stake in the firm other than having a few dozen domains hosted on WhyPark’s servers.

I have observed increasingly diminishing returns and inherent limitations with the WhyPark platform.  Specifically, I am becoming increasingly suspicious that Google and perhaps other search engines impose a rankings penalty on any site hosted on a WhyPark server (or whatever other criteria they may use to determine an association).  This is based upon a sampling of roughly 100 sites, the majority of which have been hosted on WhyPark servers for more than a year and in some cases more than two years.

I’ve experimented with the content syndication service as well as tried using the platform for development.  The amount of money generated through ad clicks and affiliate sales has remained more-or-less constant regardless of the amount of work I’ve put in to development of a given domain hosted on one of WP’s servers.

As an experiment, I tried published two sites about the same topic, one hosted with WhyPark and the other featuring a WordPress blog.  The WordPress site generated about 20x the traffic of the WhyPark site despite only featuring 60% of the amount of original content featured on the WhyPark site.  The same effort was put into marketing each site, so the discrepancy in traffic cannot be attributed to marketing/promotion.

These are far from the only sites about which I’ve noticed this phenomenon.  This is merely the most extensive experiment I have conducted to date in which sites about the same topic were developed using both WhyPark and a more conventional content management system in order to compare the traffic received by each when all other factors (besides the platform) remained more-or-less equal.

All-in-all, if a person is going to invest any effort into original content and/or promotion, I would strongly recommend utilizing a different service for site hosting and revenue generation, as the limitations inherent within the platform (for whatever reason they exist) render the effort required to develop a site hardly worth the return on that investment.

That said, I do have a couple of sites within my WhyPark portfolio that do generate a fair amount of revenue.  In the cases of these sites, there is some original content present, but far less than 50%, and little-to-no effort is invested into promoting these sites.  For whatever reason, traditionally accepted methods of traffic generation do not seem to provide any long-term benefit beyond whatever referral traffic is sent from third-party sites that link to the given WP site.

Why this is I cannot began to fathom.  One theory is that certain players within the search industry take issue with the duplicate content on sites featuring syndicated articles, but this fails to explain why sites that are completely original and updated regularly cannot seem to gain any traction.  Another possibility is that the search engines assign favorable position to sites featuring advertisements brokered by the search engine in question, or that search engines penalize sites and/or platforms that do not feature ads from which the search engine can make money.  Worthy of note is that these are theories, and certainly do not constitute definitive conclusions about the cause-and-effect.

In closing, WhyPark does have some value to certain types of domainers with certain types of domain names that are most conducive to the WhyPark platform.  With the right balance of effort and the right domain name, the platform can yield results for domains that would otherwise sit around collecting dust, or that lack the quality necessary to justify sustained development.  However, for high-quality domains (or mediocre domains at that) with which one intends to invest significant time and/or money creating content and marketing the website, an alternative hosting provider and a more established CMS will most likely yield the best long-term results.

There are few things more frustrating to a web developer than investing time, money and effort into a website that is later discovered to be limited in its potential as a result of being hosted on a server and/or using a CMS platform that for whatever reason is being blacklisted or otherwise punished by search engines for reasons outside of the control of the developer.  My advice is to save your time and money and start with a platform that provides you with a clean slate in the eyes of the SE’s.