Forum Moderators: martinibuster
ASA
I think it's going to disappoint those who wanted the entire AdSense for Domains program eliminated.
I think it's going to cause a lot of desirable domains to be unavailable for site development purposes.
FarmBoy
This is coming from someone who watches these things and thinks about them a lot. You may rationalize it all you like with remarks about "relevant information" IMHO you are monetizing error.
There may be some (tiny) redeeming value if you exercized more control over the ads being run. But as it stands this just degrades the value of the internet, hurts the acquisition of knowledge generally and slows human progress.
edited for clarity
[edited by: OnlyToday at 5:59 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2008]
I think it's going to cause a lot of desirable domains to be unavailable for site development purposes.
This is already the case, I don't think it's going to cause more. Domains are like real estate, and the likely valuable ones get snarfed up by those who can and do. AdSense TOS are actually a lot stricter than most Parking companies' are, that's going to limit some of the current domainers - and some portion of them aren't eligible for AdSense for other reasons anyway.
disclaimer: I own around 1500 domains myself
I think it's going to cause a lot of desirable domains to be unavailable for site development purposes.
This is already the case
Maybe I should have written, "it's going to cause a lot more..."
This will likely create a new wave of people seeking to get rich quick. Look for ebooks explaning the "Secret to Easy Money With Domain Names."
Even poor domains will be purchased and parked, at least until the renewal fee becomes due.
And just as it seems Google doesn't have the resources to keep bad ads out of the system (i.e. the recent diet ads), now they are going to have to devote resources to policing the domain program to weed out the trademark and intellectual property violations in the domains people register.
FarmBoy
It is a dilution and debasement of the brand and added incentive for me to find an alternative monetization for my site(s).
The good news (from the POV of legitimate publishers who can deliver valuable traffic) is that advertisers will now have a greater incentive to vet the sites where their ads run.
The bad news is that we'll soon have a flurry of complaints about miserable earnings from publishers who conveniently forget to mention that their high-quality sites consist solely of parked domains. :-)
It is a dilution and debasement of the brand and added incentive for me to find an alternative monetization for my site(s).
Those are my main concerns.
It is a dilution and debasement of the brand
AdSense has been a "lowest common denominator" network from day one. It had to be: How else was Google going to secure an overwhelmingly dominant market share?
For years, AdSense ads have been on low-value or no-value sites of every description. Are AdSense ads on parked domains really any worse than AdSense ads on scraper pages or on empty keyword-driven, template-based "Post a review" pages at big-name corporate sites?
On the positive side, advertisers no longer have to take potluck as they did just a few years ago. They can choose where their ads appear (or where they don't want their ads to appear). IMHO, that's a much more significant development than letting rank-and-file AdSense accountholders make money from parked domains in the same way that big companies have been doing all along.
To put it another way, the AdSense world is just a microcosm of the larger Web advertising and publishing world. In the latter world, you've got THE NEW YORKER, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL at one end of the spectrum, and you've got junk community shoppers at the other. AdSense is the same kind of wide-spectrum environment, except that it exists online instead of on your doorstep or in your mailbox.
Why do you ask for our top five wishes? Apparently you are spending time and efforts in things we really do *not* want as publishers.
On a related note, you might to to review the latest ASA post (12-11-08) in this thread - [webmasterworld.com...]
FarmBoy
TM is so much fun for us to enforce in oh china, russia, india...
Throw that in with the scumbags who copy wholesale our content and repackage it on blogger and are damn near impossible to track down
and lets not forget the everpresent scrapers which slowly chip away at.. blah whatever, this is getting so...
Still it seems they have the resources to get something implemented we do not want. But implementing the things we *do* want seems to be a big problem.
[edited by: Bddmed at 8:27 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2008]
But as long as this stuff keeps loitering the web, might as well be possible for the small guys also and not just the big spammers.
I think it's certainly going to fuel the theories that Google is desperate for dollars.
Or desperate for enough publisher inventory to fulfill advertiser demand. If we all worked harder, maybe Google wouldn't have to allow AdSense ads on parked domains. :-)
I'm actually satisfied that they have take big steps in keeping most of the parked domains out of the search results.
With the domains under their "umbrella" they will have even greater control making sure at least those domains are not displaying in the serps.
Parking Domains with natural traffic makes all the sense in the world , If Hotels.com was a Parked domain as hotel advertiser you'd love to get that highly targeted traffic and everyone wins from advertiser, Google and the domain owner.
As long as G remains diligent about keeping parks out of serps and all the usual stuff like monitoring the domains so the traffic is genuine and not arbitraged junk and nixing TM domains etc..looks like they have winner on their hands ..
Not showing up in my Adsense panel yet
After accepting into the program from the main Adsense page, I changed the DNS settings for a domain per their instructions, added the domain into my Adsense for Domains list, and about 10 minutes later it was working! Easy!
Thanks Santa Google!
I'd rather have Google listen (and implementing) our wishes. Domain parking was not one of them (at least not in this forum).
What if the domain channel actually added value? Making a blanket statement like 'the traffic is error' is so misinformed when you look at all the search spam out there, it pales :D
I think a lot of the guys bagging out domains need to stop taking themselves so seriously, or are they just annoyed they never had a premium domain to see what the traffic was even like?
Read the EEF report, that's why Google want the traffic, for smart advertisers that know how to use generic domains to get the best traffic in their industry. Barely any advertisers even see the oppourtunity here!
Thank you, Google, for making domain names even further unavailable for real development.
Thank you, Google, for strangling the online world.
Thank you, Google, for not listening to us.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Nobody knows what the spammer flavor of the month is until they do it. I'm hoping that owners of 1000+ MFA sites who run aggregating software almost exclusively decide to pack it in and just drop links in forums to their parked domains instead.
If that happens we may see less spam, not more, and just maybe my articles won't get instantly aggregated on a half dozen sites when I write them.
The "good" domains were unavailable anyway.
There may be some (tiny) redeeming value if you exercized more control over the ads being run. But as it stands this just degrades the value of the internet, hurts the acquisition of knowledge generally and slows human progress.
I'm trying to crunch the numbers on that comment and I can't make them work.
Dollars being spent on adwords didn't increase, places adsense will appear just increased by an unknown but probably significant percentage which means adsense earners can expect to see a lower epc as the dollars get stretched to cover more territory (which makes the middle range of internet real estate cheaper).
I'm on the fence on this, I missed the part where google will make more money from this because it's publishers who take advantage, not advertisers.
