I would like to make an interesting observation about Domains being held by their end-users that are ineffectively managed. My case study revolves around the domain name eLoans.com
I was reviewing the ownership of eLoans.com and found that it is owned by the company e-Loan inc. (Also the owners eLoan.com and e-Loan.com) As it turns out instead of forwarding the domain to their main landing page – the domain actually pulls up a GD search page.
“Parked Free, courtesy of Godaddy”. Although this could be worse (it could be a page with advertisements on it) It only pulls up a search for domains page. eLoans.com ranks in the top 50,000 websites in accordance to Alexa – and Compete.com estimates its monthly US traffic in the 800,000 uniques + range.
Compete.com also estimates that eLoans.com gets about 9,000 US visitors per month as well. If we assume the stats are comparable across the board (all traffic) we can estimate that eLoans.com gets about 1.12% the traffic of eLoan.com
Although this may not seem like much traffic – Imagine how much revenue this domain would generate in the hands of a domainer? (assume just US traffic)
9000 x .15 (15% CTR) = 1,350 Clicks
1,350 x $1.50 (estime value per click) = $2,025 per month
(my numbers are very rough, but you get the picture)
Now, what is the value of those clicks for the end-user? It appears this name was acquired sometime after 2005 / 2006 – as this is when the whois records appear to change ownership. (there was a period in 2006 where Privacy was on the domain name). So its fair to say that eLoan.com probably held this domain atleast for a year – perhaps closer to two.
I find this to be an incredible waste of a domain name, and perhaps even costly to eLoan.com altogether. I imagine not only would they save themselves a bit of money, but also perhaps close a few additional sales per month if the domain was properly managed.