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.

Well, it wasn’t a hoax and at last Google have finally introduced a level of integration between Adsense and Analytics.

This is still being rolled out at the moment – I don’t have any details on the rollout process so I’ll just have to wait for my invite but it looks to have some useful features for Adsense publishers.

From what I can gather we’ll be able to sign-up to use your existing or a new analytics account to track your Adsense performance.

• Once integrated, there will be a new ‘Adsense’ section within your analytics account where you’ll be able to see some good metrics at a ‘Page’ and ‘Referrer’ level – and will be able to drill down and analyse those metrics by such things as day, time of day, geographic location etc.
• As well as providing useful information on tour best performing sites and pages, this will also let you to assess the effects of any Adsense optimisation you do, and allow a basic form of split-testing where you could experiment with different ad formats and locations on similar pages.

It doesn’t look as though you’ll be able to analyse (yet) at an individual ad level (maybe heat maps could help?) – but from first appearances this could be a very handy tool for all you Adsense publishers out there and all from the comfor of your analytics account.

Now i’ve just got to wait for my invite

Comment during September to be in with a chance of a free domain and hosting…

Here’s my latest Adsense cheque – thanks guys…over 1 quadrillion dollars in a month  for the first time!

No – not really. It’s a real and genuine cheque though…unfortunately it’s a Zimbabwean cheque which means it’s worth sweet bugger all.

Mind you, if I ever did receive a cool but worthless cheque like that, I wouldn’t cash it – I’d blow it up and frame the thing – what a beauty!

Please – let me know if you can beat that.

Hey everyone – just a quick wrap up about a couple of things making me grumpy today:

Google PR:
After Nicks previous Google bitch slap incident, I had vague hopes that Internet Babel may start getting some of its PR back this time around. No such luck, and even Jim at The Net Fool confirmed my lowly ranking ;-(  It doesn’t really matter of course, PR ain’t that big a deal and I’ve just got to carry on with building the quality content and link building/SEO stuff.

Link-Lies/Link-Fraud:
The term ‘linkbait’ can cover a number of practices – WikiPedia breaks linkbait down into a number of distinct types, but something that really bugs me is the trend towards totally manufactured stories.

Of course, this kind of rubbish has been going on in the mainstream media for a while, and I guess there’s no real reason to assume it wouldn’t take off on the Web as well, but it annoys me when you see some of the people doing this stuff actually being proud of the crap they put out and getting some level of ‘respect’ from other people for it. It’s not as if fabricating a ‘sexy’ story and touting it to a gullible press is so difficult, it’s just that not all of us want to stoop that low.

More to the point is that the big G will start to look at ways of punishing fraudulent link-bait and people using legitimate teasers/bait/promotion methods may get caught up in the crossfire and get dragged down as well. There’s nothing wrong with building and promoting traffic and links but doing it with stuff that has absolutely no basis in truth (while trying to pass itself off as a legitimate ‘news’ piece on a respected site) is just plain wrong. A great short term result for the guy who placed it, probably not so good in the long run for everyone else.

Adsense:
This last few days, Adsense (on my other sites) has been performing  like an arthritic, three-legged nag. Very sad.

Waiting for people:
I put a bid in for some sweet domain names a few days back and the clown isn’t responding. It is annoying.

On the brighter side, I’ve got some nice ideas for upcoming posts about SEO, WP, domain speculation and parking etc – plus I have some Domain name giveaways coming up soon AND a neat little SEO project that I hope to start and that I will update about on this Blog.

On the even brighter side, I’m about to go and sink a few well-earned beers

All will be well soon and I hope your day is going better than mine.