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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.'"

8 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Taking market share from legitimate sites? by vidarlo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This can only go on as long as few enough do. When enough people start doing this, google can tell sites wanting to much money for their adspace to go stic it up. Then, legitimate sites will get hurt, advertising in general will be hurt since those fake sites is mainly a hoax.

    Further, it is quite irritating, as most of those sites don't have a single piece of information. I remember a while ago a blog set up to earn money. The blog was about asbestos damage. Quite OK if they can provide content in addition to the ads. However, my guess is that google will ban sites not having any content /other/ than their ads.

    --
    Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
    1. Re:Taking market share from legitimate sites? by Eric+Giguere · · Score: 4, Informative

      my guess is that Google will ban sites not having any content /other/ than their ads

      That's already the case -- you can't normally display AdSense ads on a site if the site doesn't have any content. If Google notices this or if someone reports it, they'll ask you to take off the ads or lose your AdSense account.

      That said, Google and other third parties do offer domain parking facilities that explicitly allow you to show ads. But you have to explicitly sign up for that kind of program.

      I don't know how any of this would be considered "illegitimate" use of domain names, though. It's the price you pay with an open market.

      Eric
  2. My opinion by erykjj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps it would make sense to increase the registration fee and/or eliminate the grace period. That way, only those who are serious about maintaining a web site would be investing in one.

    1. 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.

  3. 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.

    --
    NumB http://www.engvig.net
    1. 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
  4. I tried this... by guildsolutions · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually got one check from google, Sadly even tho all of my sites were ligitamte and had real content not just faked up content, they booted me and said that I was generating false clicks, and then refused to tell me from where... This area needs to have some laws made regulating companies and there policies so the end users, the little guys, have some rights.

  5. 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
    ----
    This may be a shameless plug for my website, but at least it's got content.