Google Adsense Cracking Down on 'Tasters'

ZerothOfTheLaw writes "It appears that Google is going to eliminate Adsense for Domains for all domains younger than five days old. From the post 'The Good news is that the Quantity of advertising will be spread among fewer domains now and so those domain owners that actually own real full domains should receive more money if bid prices start to rise as a result of this. However some advocates of Domain Tasting say that perhaps no one will be able to serve the niche for some ads and no one will make money on the unserved ads.'"

Re:Tasting parasites

[Firethorn]

Well, imagine that you're a company/person contracted to build a website for XYZ Company. You come up with a dozen or so potential domain names, 'tasting' them in order to make sure they're available(without tying them up for a full year, or spending the money to register them for a year). You then present the domain names to the company, which picks the one they like the best, maybe one other for a redirect. You then release the other four and call it a day.

Make sense that way. Abusers, of course, were not initially considered.

Re:Google Spam

[Sigma 7]

It'll never happen, because there is no way Google would do anything to reduce it's revenue, but they really need to do something about Google Ad Spam on web pages.

Domain name tasters don't pay google to have ads displayed - they get paid by google.

As an example, we'll say that NetworkDNS registers a domain name that you look up. When you attempt to register from GoDaddy, you find it's been snatched up. When the 10 people that visit the site look at the page, Google pays NetworkDNS for showing these 10 ads while NetworkDNS pays nothing for tasting a registration. These 10 people are not going to follow links as most normal people can recognize a taster/pseudo-site page instantly - the result is that the ad impressions are weakened and the persons advertising don't get as much impact from advertisements that they should (as opposed to the real advertisements that you might see at the top of the page.)

Let's take this a step further - instead of NetworkDNS doing registration, you have 419-scammers entering in new territory. They use third-party credit cards to fund the 5-day taste, make money from ads (or possibly transferring) within the five days, and the registrars get hit with a chrageback.

More and more web sites have more Google Ad 'content' than real, useful information.

Unless you encounter those sites by searching, don't visit them. Problem solved.

Re:Google Spam

[EVil Lawyer]

Um, you're kind of wrong about a couple of points. Google doesn't pay the site owner for "displaying" ads, it pays them when and only when someone actually clicks on those ads. Second, Google is, in a certain sense, "paid" by the domain name tasters, to the extent that the ad clicks generated by the tasting domains only exist as a result of someone tasting that domain: Google gets a certain amount, $X from the advertiser, whenever someone clicks on an advertiser's ad, and then pays $X-Y to the person who owns the page where the ad was displayed. So Google in effect is "paid" $Y by the domain tasters, in the sense that that click was only possible as a result of the page existing.

Domain kiting mainly

[kbahey]

According to the CBC [www.cbc.ca] they are mainly targeting so called domain kiting (repeated tasting), which will impact tasting too.

Re:That's a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have Adblock+ installed you can add the following rule:

slashdot.org#div(inlinead)