Article calls parked domains parasitic, but doesn’t explore the alternative.

In a recent article at Times Online, Jonathan Weber says that parked pages, by their definition, are parasitic:

If you type in “debts.com” for example, you get a site filled with nothing but paid links to other sites. Presumably, this is not what someone going to that page is looking for, but it’s a nice business for the domain owner.

It seems peculiar and unjust that so much money could be made by taking advantage of people’s clumsiness in finding what they are looking for on the web. Sites that exist only to generate pay-per-click revenues from people looking for something else are parasitic by definition; they interfere with the process of finding information, and take money out of the pockets of real information providers. There’s no way to know how big a drain this is on the internet economy, but my guess is that it’s not trivial.

Hmmm. I suppose it may be better if there were a true, content rich site at the domain rather than a parking page. But if there were no parking page, there would be nothing. Just because all of the links are paid ads doesn’t mean they aren’t relevant. I’d rather see a page full of highly targeted ads than a page full of nothing.

In fact, I used to search at the GoTo.com search engine even though all of the search results were ads — Especially when I was looking to buy something. I find paid search results more relevant than organic search results much of the time. Someone is actually paying for those clicks, and you can rest assured they’d yank their ad if the traffic it receive wasn’t relevant.