Internet Babel

Google are rolling out their Adsense for Domains product, initally in North America but soon to be worldwide.

What is Adsense for Domains?

This allows Adsense publishers to carry Adsense adverts on undeveloped, or parked domains – thus opening up another income stream that can be managed via your Google account.

Publishers will be able to add and manage parked domains through their Adsense account, customising (to an extent) the page appearance. The product will apparently allow you to do some analysis of stats on these domains as well. You then just have to point your Domains to Google’s nameservers and your parked Adsense domain will be up and running.

Parking

Previously, people wishing to get some revenue from undeveloped domains have had to use services such as NameDrive, Sedo, WhyPark etc. to park and monetize their domains – unless they wanted to develop and host mini-sites. These parking companies do, of course, take a percentage of all advertising revenue before it is passed on to you.

Initial Thoughts

• I believe that the standard restrictions/Terms will apply with regard to domain names/nature.
• I would imagine that Google may not pass on the ‘full’ Adsense payment when Ads are clicked on a parked domain, but will set the payout somewhere between their normal amount and what you’d get from a Parking company but that’s just a guess.
• Parking with Google almost certainly won’t make any difference to how (or if) Google indexes your domain either. 
• It doesn’t look like there will be any opportunity to mark the domain as ‘For Sale’ or to carry any other affiliate ads on the page. 

I’m not in North America so haven’t seen the product first-hand yet, but I’ll be trying a selection of my undeveloped domains on it as soon as I can – and I’ll be comparing results against what I’ve been getting at NameDrive.

What’s the Impact?

The parking companies are bound to be concerned by this development, as Google extends its reach/dominance even further – but until Google offers a range of templates/skins and keyword customisation options that can compete with what you get at NameDrive for example then they won’t be panicking to much just yet.

Time will tell if it’s going to be a good thing for Publishers. If the idea takes off then Google will almost certainly expand the feature range to make it more flexible for Publishers – but I would guess that many people only use Parking services as a ’holding’ area or use them as a test-bed for domain names to see what kind of type-in traffic they get before developing a proper site or mini-site on them.