Google Adsense Cracking Down on 'Tasters' 187
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:That's a problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, but Google seems to actively support this kind of domain squatting - see http://www.google.com/domainpark/ [google.com] . Seriously, how does this 'service' they provide possibly fit into "don't be evil" ?
Re:Tasting parasites (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't give purchasers the ability to cancel their order without cost when they changed their mind, it generally ends up costing you more than it's worth.
Re:Tasting parasites (Score:4, Interesting)
This would give you the ability to grab the names for the client to consider, but not allow people to set up these link farms unless they actually shell out the money to outright purchase the name.
Re:What do you want to do about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Tasting parasites (Score:1, Interesting)
They could go to their client and ask them how many domain name would you like to be presented with? 10? O.k. That'll be $100 added to your bill. How many domains do you really present to the client. I doubt its ever much more than 10. Doing whois lookups on domain names would be safe again, because the bad people are not going to spend $10 to "trial" a domain.
Most of that $10 fee (say 80%) would go ICANN't, only a part to the registrar. This would also help prevent those nefarious domain prospectors (all of which are nefarious), from becoming their own registrar (which some are) and "tasting" a domain for really cheap.
Then if you want to make the domain yours after the trial, it can be up the registrar if they want to apply part or all of that fee to the cost of registering the domain. Most probably wouldn't since they didn't get most of that fee. You could also bypass the trail fee altogether by just buying the domain, which would be the cheaper thing to do at some registrars. Which brings up another point. ICANN't should be able to stipulate that no domain should be registered for less than XXX amount or they should take a larger fee so those nefarious domain prospectors costs would go up from the $0.20 or $0.25 per domain to register it with ICANN't and it would stop or slow them down from just registering every domain under the sun.
Re:That's a problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
New feature request for NoScript: CSS repair function to fix "missing" banner ads..
Pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Register a domain A and pay for it
2. Wait 5 days
3. Put ads on it
4. "Taste" some domains
5. Put a redirector page from the tasted domains to domain A, or show the content of domain A in a frame
6. Profit!
Am I missing something here?
Re:That's a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
I promptly switched off the "I'm willing to test the new discussion system" flag. If they implement it, I'll stop using Slashdot.
Suggestion - post to this thread if you think likewise, and we can take an opportunity to express displeasure at screwing up a discussion system due to an utterly misguided attempt at threading adverts in amongst our own posts.
Re:That's a problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Too many people assume $5 domains (Score:4, Interesting)
These days, I have no idea how I would go about registering a domain without paying for it. I don't see the option readily available at any registrars that I work with (although, I personally stay away from the big guns like godaddy and network solutions). It seems to me that the people who are doing it tend to be those who want to park domains and put ads up temporarily - and frankly I am opposed to this - as it's nothing but spam.
Would getting rid of the tasting option get rid of these guys? No. It takes a minimal investment to create a certified registrar and at that point domain purchases are cheap enough that you can buy them in bulk at a price point that doesn't do much to preclude the web-spam business model.
But looking back at the reasons for this in the first place - one might want to register a domain, but not have the money to do it immediately. One might change their mind about a registration. Yeah, in the days of $5 and $10 domains, these points seem to lose a great deal of value, but there was a time when it would cost you more than $100 to register a domain. There was also a time when dictionary words and 3 letter domains were widely available because there was no market for commerce on the internet.
If a registrar were to make widely available the "pay in a week" model I certainly would not be opposed to it. If you want to attack the web-spam business model, I think you should do so directly - much like Google is doing.
Re:That's a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry - I shouldn't need to use a specific web browser to view a particular website. Especially when my browser is one of the first to have been acid2 compliant...
Re:Tasting parasites (Score:3, Interesting)
In the real economy, if you don't like a company, you can boycott them. In the parked domain economy, boycotting doesn't do anything. But instead of boycotting, you can picket them. Come back to the page day after day and click the links again and again. If you get enough people to do that, someone starts to lose money, and when people lose money, they take notice.