NamesCon: Spotlight on ParkingCrew

Below is an interview with Axel Kaltz, Managing Director, ParkingCrew.com. For the past month, I have been interviewing NamesCon exhibitors and sponsors.

NamesCon will be held January 11-14, 2015 at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. To date, over 500 people have registered to attend the conference, and we are expecting to have 800 registered conference attendees in attendance.

Can you tell us about your company and how long you have been there?

ParkingCrew.com is a direct navigation monetization provider. Founded by industry pioneers, it was built as a monetization platform from domainers for domainers, specifically catering to a professional domainers needs with features that no other parking company offers, such as our Blocked & Adult Check feature allowing our clients to check the status for names that are not listed in their account or our Profitability feature showing which domains to renew and which to let go.

I met Nico and Stefan in my previous job when I was handling their parking accounts at Sedo and the relationship changed pretty quickly from business partners to friends. When I visited Nico in London in 2007, he seemed to foresee that one day we would work together and his prediction came true 5 years later. I have been with the company for more than 2 years now. I love the job, the team, our clients, the product and the constant developments; working at ParkingCrew is the best thing that happened to me in my working life.

To learn more about the ParkingCrew story, you should watch this video: http://vimeo.com/55537110.

This is your second time at NamesCon. Can you tell us about your first time and what you got out of it?

When I first heard about NamesCon and who was involved in setting up the show, it was clear that it would be successful. Jodi, James, Richard and Jothan executed perfectly and it was an awesome conference. I felt at home at the conference right from the beginning, met tons of new and interesting people, established fruitful business relationships and intensified existing client relations like at no other show before.

This will be your first time sponsoring at NamesCon. Can you tell us why you are sponsoring this year and what you hope to get out of NamesCon?

Our main marketing channel continues to be word-of-mouth. We have remained true to ourselves and not sponsored conferences or shipped expensive gimmicks and we will stick to this.

However, we love the Namescon Team and the idea of combining our sponsorship with a donation to the WaterSchool. Our goal with sponsoring a foosball table is to offer a place where attendees can relax after a long business meeting and make new contacts while doing something that helps to make the world a little better. More information on how we are trying to reach that goal will follow soon. Stay tuned…

What are your thoughts on the new TLDs?

Honestly I think it might take decades for the average consumer to adapt to the new TLDs and start using them. Right now I expect them to be more confused by the amount of options available. Nevertheless, I expect some of them to do really well in the long run. At ParkingCrew we monetize every new TLD and it will be exciting to see which ones will be picking up traffic and become successful from a parking point of view. I wish everyone in the space all the best and lots of success!

Where do you see the domain parking space going in the next year?

The industry has been changing and evolving very fast in the past couple of years and it has been a game of survival of the fittest. The companies that came out on top of the race were those that invested in technology and were able to adapt quickly to new trends and overcome the challenges associated with them. What was a scattered industry two years ago has really consolidated into few major brands dominating the market. We expect this consolidation to continue and are very much looking forward to continuing the path that ParkingCrew has taken in the past couple of years.

Can you tell us about how your company helps deliver value to your customers?

Before ParkingCrew was founded we invested our time and resources into building out a solution that worked for Tier2 traffic. At that time many other traditional parking companies treated that kind of traffic like a stepchild. We, however, developed a stable platform that allowed us to monetize every visitor to the max.

Additionally, having been domainers ourselves, we know that there is more to it than just registering domains and making money while you are sleeping – being a domainer is a hard job and with our platform we try to provide the best solution possible to make the domainers life a little easier.

You are a leader in technology! What are your thoughts about where technology is going in the next year?

When we started ParkingCrew in 2011 we knew that the only way to break into a well-established industry was through superior technology and automation. Investing in technology rather than manual optimization is what allows us to keep our overhead costs low and pay out the highest rev shares. The same philosophy guided our development of DNTX and we believe that technology will be the key driver of growth for both products in the upcoming years. Our two products combined are processing billions of ad requests every single month. When you are dealing with that amount of monetization opportunities, even little improvements in technology can have a huge impact on revenues for your customers.