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Pay-Per-Click Speculation Market Soaring

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-money-where-you-can dept.

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that the number of web sites being opened purely to publish pay-per-click advertising links from the likes of Google and Yahoo is rocketing, according to VeriSign, which runs the .com and .net domain names." From the article: "Sclavos said that the company will change the way it reports the size of its domain name business, in terms of active registrations, because of the amount of speculation going on. It will reduce the size of the reported registrations by about 2%, he said. 'Names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers...The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period.'"

11 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Is this news? by numb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Isnt this just plain capitalism. If they can earn money of buying names and put up ads on them, then why not?

    Dont sse any news here, move along.

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    NumB http://www.engvig.net
    1. Re:Is this news? by pmazer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The only problem I see is that they're snatching up names so that the people who want to use those names for a "valid" business will have to buy them at a premium, or can't access them at all.

    2. Re:Is this news? by Eric+Giguere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That argument doesn't hold: if these "snatchers" are making money from those domain names, then they are in fact running "valid" businesses themselves. In other words, they're doing what all good businesses try to do: make money.

      Eric
  2. Pay-per-click by GuitarNeophyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's too bad that search engine results are so full of all-advertising sites that good sites tend to fall though the cracks. I've seen a number of pretty-decent websites that didn't show up until the tenth page of a google search just because they weren't "Optimized for search engine traffic". It's annoying.

    I read an article a while back that says that anyone who does anything purely for the purposes of making their websites show up higher on search engine results than they should are scammers. I believe it. No matter how whitehat you are, if you're trying to beat the system, you're a scammer. period.

    Dumb ol' no-good-content-advertiser-based-websites.

    Luke
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    This may be a shameless plug for my website, but at least it's got content.

  3. Re:My opinion by Dachannien · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wait, don't get rid of the registration fee before I have a chance to write a brute-force "register everything" script.

  4. Flippin' burgers by jfengel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So between the domain name and faked keywords on the site trying to pump up the page rank, they're trying to get people to go to their site and then click on one of the pay-per-click links.

    1. Put up a web page
    2. Pray that just based on the domain name people will come
    3. Profit

    Yeah, I guess we know what step 2 is, but pay-per-click is pennies, and you have to do all that setup work coming up with names, hosting the site, etc. I suppose its profitable, but jeez, at what point is it just easier to get a job flipping burgers? Or maybe even a reputable IT job?

    Google pay-per-click money is free only if your time is worth nothing.

  5. Evict the Squatters by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Insightful

    At least these speculators are recycling the names quickly when they're not using them. I get pissed off when I hit a website, and get one of those fake "search portal" fronts from a squatter. There's got to be a way to make people use the minimum appropriate domain names for their sites, without charging more than necessary for the name. Maybe a $50 deposit, refunded after a month, held in escrow by the registrar? Maybe a traffic requirement for retaining the name, if there are other bids for it? That can survive a cheap "click simulation service" that keeps up fake traffic?

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    --
    make install -not war

  6. They'll never get paid by jpbutler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Google only pays out once you've passed $100 in income. If these guys are only making $10/year, they won't be seeing anything anytime soon.

  7. Crap sites yeild crap traffic by salesgeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Crappy websites yeild horrible traffic. I will pay $8 per click for good traffic. I won't pay at all for bad traffic. Google has steadily declined in the quality of traffic they provide over the past couple of years. Overture, too has slid.

    Eventually, Google and Yahoo will have to cull the herd (actually they do right now). They must deliver a good value compared to other kinds of advertisements. Advertisers have pulled the rug out from under the online ad market before, and they will again if they see costs for conversions going sky-high. Right now that is the trend.

    Another problem is that crap websites create noise in search engine results diluting Google's core product and Yahoo's second product (their first is the myYahoo! portal).

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    -- $G
  8. Does Google, Yahoo, and Their Advertisers Care? by mikes.song · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Really, do they care? Google and Yahoo both work to *not* list SPAM sites... But, say a site has zero content on it, and the site is only ads, and the site is not listed in the search engines, but people still visit, click, and buy. Who cares?

  9. Re:My opinion by Cromac · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Wait, don't get rid of the registration fee before I have a chance to write a brute-force "register everything" script.

    This should be modded up (sorry, no points left) because that is exactly what would happen if there weren't any registration fee. Hell we're not far from that now with the companies who register tens of thousands of domains and park them for no reason other than to sell it to someone.