NamesCon 2016 is less than one week away from today! If you haven’t registered to attend, there is still time to register. The conference will be held in Las Vegas at the Tropicana Hotel from January 10-13. Over 1,100 attendees have registered and 1,200 are now expected to attend.
Today’s sponsor spotlight interview is with Axel Kaltz of ParkingCrew.com. Axel answered quite a few questions about the company and he shared some domain industry thoughts expectations. If you have any questions about ParkingCrew.com, you are invited to share them in the comment section.
See you soon!
What is your company’s mandate, what sets you apart?
Our vision is very simple: to provide the best domain monetization platform out there – combining the most innovative technology as well as top-class customer service.
We’re a small operation with big ideas. We have a great team that makes up the ParkingCrew family. We are tremendously proud of our team who is 110% committed to making sure that we offer the best service and functionality available.
Who benefits from your product or service?
We are a premium-parking provider – we focus more on the quality of traffic and ads served rather than the quantity of domains. Our platform is therefore open to all domainers regardless of whether they are large portfolio owners or owners of single domain names. At Team Internet we currently monetize more than 35 million domain names.
What factors have contributed to your company’s growth and success?
ParkingCrew has a small, but very agile team. Since we began operations, we have focused very much on auto-optimization as well as improving our learning-algorithms. This has allowed the company to scale very quickly, while maintaining a comparatively small workforce.
Of course our success would not have been possible without our greatest asset – our customers. We take interaction with our clients seriously and actively encourage them to suggest ways that we can improve our platform, which has paid off greatly – some of the best product improvements have come as a result of direct customer participation.
What’s the story behind how your company was founded?
Team Internet was founded in January 2010, as a holding company operating in the field of traffic monetization and domain services. “Ideas. Change. Markets.” is the philosophy Team Internet applies to all of its products. The most well-known products are ParkingCrew and DNTX.com, our traffic monetization platform for Zero-click and Pop advertising.
The company was founded by Nico Zeifang, Stefan Wiegard and Mario Witte. In the past, Nico and Stefan were mostly focused on domain and portfolio acquisitions. There were dozens of domain parking platforms at the time and they monetized with most of them. As the years past, they were getting more and more uncomfortable about declining revenues, hard-to-navigate user interfaces and a culture where customer feedback went unnoticed, so they decided it was time to build a parking platform by domainers for domainers. At this point they needed a guy that knew more than html, and with Chief Technical Officer Mario Witte and his high tech skill set, they completed the team that built the platform of their dreams – Check out our ParkingCrew and DNTX Video.
How would you define your company strategy and vision?
Parkingcrew was established by domainers, for domainers. We know that being a domainer is a tough job, it means crawling-, comparing & analyzing data, knowing which domains to register, when to buy, sell and transfer names and so much more. We understand and listen to the needs of our clients, which has resulted in dozens of optimizations to our platforms that make the life of our customers a little easier.
At ParkingCrew, we aim to provide the best all-round parking experience. Many of us are domainers ourselves – therefore we can easily put ourselves in our clients’ shoes and know what is expected from us while listening carefully to the needs of our clients. We aim to provide a product that we love to use and are constantly looking to improve and evolve our platform to provide the most intuitive, user-friendly and of course the most profitable product on the market.
What major milestones has your company accomplished?
In 2015 we have seen tremendous growth, organically as well as through the acquisition of NameDrive, one of the oldest brands in the industry.
But it is not just us who have experienced tremendous growth; we have also seen customer portfolios triple or quadruple in size this past year with some of them now holding more than 100,000 domains in their portfolios.
Still very much a young and fresh company, ParkingCrew has emerged over the past 3 years as a leading player in the domain monetization market. The simultaneous growth of our sister company DNTX.com has allowed us to optimize our clients Tier2 earnings to the max. We take a very innovative approach to our work and are regularly introducing additional features and improvements to our site. We very much value customer feedback and have been happy to incorporate some of client’s great ideas, including the following services and features:
- 2-Factor Authentication to provide an additional layer of protection to your valuable data
- Realtime nameserver checks within your ParkingCrew account, including the ability to filter the results
- Side by side stats that allow you to compare the performance of individual domains month over month
- adult and block check to give you full transparency of how our upstream feed provider classifies your domains
- … and a lot more!
How will your company engage attendees at the upcoming NamesCon?
We have a surprise up our sleeves that we are sure you will enjoy. Come and find out more by visiting our booth. You can also challenge us to a game at the ParkingCrew foosball table.
Since the last NamesCon, ParkingCrew has introduced many improvements and additions to the platform that we would love to show existing and new users by guiding you through our interface and show you what we can offer in person. If you would like to schedule a meeting with us in advance, please get in touch with us: david@parkingcrew.com.
Can you tell us about your first time at NamesCon and what you got out of it?
I was astonished how professionally the first NamesCon conference was setup. I knew immediately that this would be the place to make new contacts and improve relationships with existing business partners in the years to come. If you are looking for leads, as well as a great time in Vegas, then NamesCon is a definite must.
What are your thoughts on the new TLDs?
The launch of new TLDs has certainly increased the number and variety of names parked at ParkingCrew. We closely monitor the introduction of new TLDs into the market and make sure that our system is capable of supporting them. This means that whether you own a .cars, .internet or .insurance name, you can be sure that we immediately can monetize every visitor.
Our experience with the launch of new TLDs has taught us that these usually do not attract large amounts of traffic from the offset. Trillions of dollars has been spent on the promotion of .com names which is now firmly rooted in the subconscious of the vast majority of internet users. We therefore don’t expect large traffic volumes until some of these TLDs have been established as developed sites. What will then follow is that these names will drop and have expiring traffic, which is ideal to monetize through ParkingCrew.
What are you most looking forward to at the upcoming conference?
As NamesCon stands out in the domaining circuit as the top event of the year, it is a unique opportunity for us to meet so many like-minded people in one place. We are looking forward to hearing the latest industry news, catch up with our clients and also to making new friends and connections.
Where can attendees find out more about your company, product or services while at NamesCon?
We will be attending NamesCon in force and will have a beautiful (and very unique) booth in the exhibition hall this year. The entire ParkingCrew Team is looking forward to making new contacts, meeting old friends & business partners and having a great & successful time at the conference. Drop by and meet David, Peter, Jim, Max and Axel. In case the booth is empty, you will most likely find us at the foosball table. Feel free to reach out to david@parkingcrew.com or to your Account Manager to setup a meeting in advance.
How has NamesCon helped your company achieve its goals?
From our experience, NamesCon has provided a complete package and been one of the most useful networking opportunities of the domaining calendar. The conference has always been superbly organized, has very impressive attendance and truly engaging and motivating speaker sessions. The team works tirelessly throughout the year to make sure that we have the necessary support to fulfill the targets that we set for the event. We are extremely thankful to the amazing NamesCon team. NamesCon has not only provided us the opportunity to strengthen client relationships but has also opened opportunities and allowed us to make invaluable new connections.
Great interview! ParkingCrew.com has been my parking company for a long time.