It was reported back in April 2008 that NetworkSolutions.com was hijacking unassigned sub domains off of clients but are domain parking companies doing the same? Hard to say!

For some reason I have a pretty hard time typing in any other TLD then .com . I think it’s simply because I type .com 99% of the time..

So anyway, when I try to go to Bit.ly, the URL shortening service, I often either type in bitly.com or even more odd.. add the .com to the end: bit.ly.com making it a sub domain.

Since LY.com would be the domain I was actually typing in, the bit. becomes the sub domain. LY.com happens to be parked using DomainSponsor.

So what’s on bit.ly.com ?

That’s a parked page. Now the question is… did the owner of LY.com (iGenesis Limited) set up the parked page or is DomainSponsor (Oversee.net’s parking company) making the money from any clicks on the sub domain? The sub domain parking page and the normal domains parking page do look alike and both show the LY.com domain.

Can somebody (a customer) even set up a sub domain to make money via parking?

I know in the past I have "forgot" to add a domain to my parking account but the domain name still resolves with the parking service, since I set the DNS to do so. Not adding the domain to MY account, allows any money being made to go to the parking company from my understand, as I know it’s not going to me at that point. This is also basically what happens when people leave Default DNS settings after a domain name is registered.

So the question here…. is DomainSponsor profiting off of the or any sub domain of LY.com or any domain using it’s service? Not sure.

Do the clicks from a sub domain go directly to the "main" domain? Not sure. I do know the URL does not change away from the sub domain in the address bar as shown in the SS above.

If the clicks from a sub domain do go to the main domain, is there reporting to show this is happening? Not sure.

Did the owner of LY.com set up the sub domain parking page? Not likely, as I checked "other" domains using DS with a sub domain and they all resolved. So this appears to be an automatic kind of thing. I also tried it with a Fabulous.com parked domain and Parked.com parked domain and sub domains resolved.

Does the owner of LY.com even KNOW the sub domain bit.ly.com resolves to a parking page? Not sure.

Again, more questions then answers. If I could guess, it appears that any sub domain that get’s traffic off of a parked domain, would basically "report" the same as if the person visited the domain name directly.

Should the parking companies report traffic so the domain owner can see people are using sub domains for whatever reason, yes. Without reporting, a domain parking customer would never Really know if sub domain traffic is or is not happening. The same thing would be said for the revenue generated.