Who's Been Eating My Porridge?

Sometimes I am so lazy I can hardly believe it.

I don't own one of the largest domain name portfolios, but even so, I pay such little attention to my names that now, other people have started using my domains to make themselves money.

It's hard to believe that somebody could do this isn't it? But, you snooze, you lose and that's exactly what I have done with a number of my .co.uk domain names.

All of my .CO.UK domain names are purchased through 123reg.co.uk as I like to keep them all in one place. To be honest, there are probably better registrars out there. I keep asking Fabulous.com to buy them out, so that I can use their excellent management tools, but so far my calls have gone unheard. (I register all of my .com's through Fabulous).

Anyway, this morning, I was looking at one of my names (articlewriter.co.uk) with the intention of building another "for sale" site for it. It might even be finished by the time you read this.

I logged into my 123reg account to change the nameservers and did a quick check to see it was resolving properly.

What I actually landed on was a PPC page hosted by 123reg.

123reg haven't asked my permission to use my property to make themselves some extra money and they certainly don't provide me with the tools to do it myself. (Unlike the very fabulous, Fabulous.com).

Now most times, I am pretty good with my names and either host them or redirect them myself, but occasionally, like in this case, I buy them and pretty much forget about them, believing them to be safe.

To be fair to 123reg, I have noticed this previously and have written to them asking them to stop using my domains for their own purposes. I even asked for a revenue share once, but didn't get a very enthusiastic reply.

I don't know whether to be worked up about this or not. Part of me thinks it's my own fault for leaving the domain untouched. Another part of me thinks I've been robbed.

Parking is still big business. It's even bigger if someone else is paying for the domain names!

The moral of the story is that I really must be more vigilant and stop allowing others to get more value from my names than I do.