For roughly twenty years there was a default answer to what to do with a domain you were not using: park it, collect a little advertising revenue, and wait for a buyer. That answer stopped working in 2025. Google opted every existing advertiser out of parked-domain placements by default in February 2025 and captured the last of them that September. Team Internet, which ran one of the two largest domain monetisation businesses in the world, reported audited 2025 Search segment revenue down 59% to USD 222.0m, with revenue per thousand sessions down 51% to USD 34 on sessions that fell only 19%. The traffic did not disappear; the money that paid for it did. Sedo's third quarter of 2025 fell 66%, and Bodis stopped monetising domains on 31 January 2026 after three days' notice.
The consequence is that a great many people are holding names that earn nothing and cost money every year. Some are investors with hundreds or thousands of domains and a spreadsheet that no longer balances. Others bought a single name for an idea they never got round to, and have never been told what the options are. This site is written for both, and it does not assume you know the jargon.
It is worth being precise about what changed, because the reflex response to a collapse is usually the wrong one. Parking did not fail because domain traffic stopped existing. Team Internet's own numbers show sessions falling by a fifth while the revenue on those sessions fell by half. What ended was a distribution arrangement: the advertisers whose budgets funded parked-page inventory were moved out of it, and the pricing on what remained fell with them. A domain that received a hundred type-in visitors a month still receives them. There is simply no longer a business that will pay meaningfully for the privilege of showing them advertisements. That distinction matters, because it means the answer is not to find a replacement parking company. It is to decide what a name is actually for.
What this site contains
What follows is a reference rather than a sales pitch. Eighteen strategy profiles cover what you can reasonably do with a domain, split into passive strategies that take an afternoon and can be reversed the same day, and active strategies that cost real money or real time and mostly cannot be undone. Each explains the mechanics, the costs, what the strategy realistically returns in 2026, what it does to resale prospects, and when it is the wrong call. Several conclude that the honest answer is to do nothing expensive at all.
How to use this site
There are three kinds of page here, and they answer different questions.
- Strategy profiles. Eighteen of them, one per option, from parking through to letting the name drop. Read these when you know which domain you are talking about and want to know what a specific course of action actually involves. Every profile follows the same structure, so two of them can be compared side by side without reading either end to end: the mechanics, the 2026 costs and returns, the effect on resale value and inbound inquiries, when the strategy is right, when it is wrong, and the mistakes that recur.
- Guides. Longer explanations of the questions that cut across strategies rather than sitting inside one — what happened to domain parking, whether exact match domains still work, how to sell a domain name, how domain valuation is actually done, buying expired domains and backorders, how forwarding and redirects behave, and the flat question of whether developing a domain hurts its resale value.
- Calculators. Five of them, all running entirely in your browser. Carrying cost across a holding period, the break-even sale price once acquisition and commission are counted, a three-way comparison of parked against developed against leased, what to charge for a domain lease, and a portfolio triage tool that returns a develop, lease, list, hold or drop recommendation with its reasoning exposed, so that when you disagree with it you can see which step you disagree with.
If you own one domain and have a decision to make this week, start with the triage tool and then read the two strategy profiles it points you at. If you own a portfolio, start with carrying cost, because the number that changes portfolio behaviour is almost always the annual renewal bill rather than any individual name.
Who this is for
Two readers use a site like this, and they are genuinely different people with different correct answers.
The portfolio investor holds tens, hundreds or thousands of names and has an arithmetic problem. Renewals arrive whether or not anything sells, the monetisation income that used to offset them has gone, and the question is not what to do with a domain but which domains deserve any attention at all. For this reader most of the reference is a filter. The right answer for the bulk of a portfolio is a listing or a drop, and the interesting work is identifying the handful of names that justify anything more — which is settled by renewal cost, inbound inquiry history and whether a buyer can be named, not by how good a name sounds when you say it out loud.
The one-domain owner bought a name for an idea, never built the thing, and has been renewing it out of a vague sense that letting go would be a mistake. For this reader the arithmetic barely matters: one .com renewal is a rounding error against a year of anyone's time. The real questions are whether the subject of the name is obvious enough for a site to make sense on it, whether there is any appetite to maintain something once it exists, and whether the idea is still worth pursuing. Frequently the honest answer is to keep renewing the name, spend nothing, and get on with the rest of your life — which is a legitimate strategy with its own profile, not a failure to decide.
Where those two readers should be told different things, the pages say which reader they are talking to.
What we won't tell you
Two limits, stated at the top rather than buried at the bottom.
Nobody can tell you what your domain is worth to the one buyer who wants it. Valuation is described here as a set of methods with their assumptions and weaknesses attached, not as a prediction, because a domain is worth what a particular buyer pays on a particular day and that buyer's budget is invisible from outside. Automated appraisals routinely disagree with each other by an order of magnitude on the same string. Comparable sales tell you what somebody else's name fetched, which is evidence about the market and not about yours. Anyone who gives you a confident single figure for a specific domain is giving you an opinion dressed as a measurement.
Anyone promising a ranking outcome is guessing. Search engines control their own results and change how they work without notice. No consultant, agency or builder can commit to a position, a traffic level or an AI citation, and the published work on time-to-rank measures the wait in months to years rather than weeks. What can be committed to is the build itself: the standards it is held to, the deliverables, and the checks it has to pass. Results inside somebody else's index are not in anyone's gift.
There is also one claim you will not find here in any form: that developing a domain makes it sell for more. No credible dataset supports it, and several well-regarded domain investors argue the reverse, that a live site suppresses the inbound inquiries a for-sale page would have attracted. That argument is taken seriously throughout this site rather than waved away.
We do build sites on domains for owners who decide that is right for a particular name. That is a decision for a few domains, not a portfolio — read the reference first.