Slashdot Mirror
Google Adsense Cracking Down on 'Tasters'
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.'"
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
Good. Advertising revenue is not something that anyone is entitled to receive. Show me a site with useful content supported with unobtrusive advertising and maybe you'll get my eyeballs for a while. What we don't need are more linkfarms.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I never quite understood the "tasting" concept. The vast majority of the people utilizing "tasting" are doing it for unscrupulous reasons. Anyone with a legitimate need for a domain is going to be willing to pay the going rate to actually register one.
Mod me off-topic, but sometimes the English language takes a surreal turn - Domain Tasting? Does .mil have a metallic, cordite taste while .com is a cornucopia of flavors?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
If your spam filter hadn't worked so well, you'd have seen the offer to sell you something to help you with that ageusia problem.
You really should upgrade to Hotmail, so we can do a better job of serving you.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Why is is evil? Well, domain tasters are folks trying to capitalize on traffic they don't really own. That's kind of hard to understand but you have to understand the definition of domain tasting to full grasp that.
.com and .net domain names were the result of domain tasting." (Information Week)
This should also help understand the "evil" behind the practice...
"In January 2007, VeriSign said that among the top 10 domain registrars, 95% of all deleted
Google's doing this to protect users who get to these sites on accident. I guess it's good for everyone.
How to Download YouTube Videos
For me, Google adsense for domains is a scammers paradise anyway. How many hours haven't I wasted walking over "parked" domains trying to find a real domain. Let's face it - 99% of the "parked" domains aren't parked - they are purchased because people will visit them by mistake. It would be much faster if the domains simply didn't exist and as such wouldn't turn up in search results.
Don't taste me, bro!
As an example, we'll say that NetworkDNS registers a domain name that you look up. When you attempt to register from GoDaddy, you find it's been snatched up. When the 10 people that visit the site look at the page, Google pays NetworkDNS for showing these 10 ads while NetworkDNS pays nothing for tasting a registration. These 10 people are not going to follow links as most normal people can recognize a taster/pseudo-site page instantly - the result is that the ad impressions are weakened and the persons advertising don't get as much impact from advertisements that they should (as opposed to the real advertisements that you might see at the top of the page.)
Let's take this a step further - instead of NetworkDNS doing registration, you have 419-scammers entering in new territory. They use third-party credit cards to fund the 5-day taste, make money from ads (or possibly transferring) within the five days, and the registrars get hit with a chrageback. More and more web sites have more Google Ad 'content' than real, useful information. Unless you encounter those sites by searching, don't visit them. Problem solved.
We're all nerds here, and this seems to be a real problem. What can we do about it? Can a Firefox plugin be made to weed out flagged squatted domains? Have you physically complained to Google either through email, written letter, or even in a blog posting/article? Or on the other end, perhaps we could evelop a software suite for parked domains that provides relevant information. Parked domains are annoying, but they'd be less annoying if they were still relevant.
It'd be kind of neat if accidentally typoing britenyspears.com brought up feeds with news on Britney Spears along with ads and other monetization schemes rather than just some boring Ad Directory that most are currently like. Anyway, my point is: If you hate this so much, why aren't you doing something about it? What can we do to stop it, or help to solve it? I don't imagine we can completely rule it out but there's bound to be plenty of ways we can weaken its hold. The world can't change unless you try to change it.
Um, you're kind of wrong about a couple of points. Google doesn't pay the site owner for "displaying" ads, it pays them when and only when someone actually clicks on those ads. Second, Google is, in a certain sense, "paid" by the domain name tasters, to the extent that the ad clicks generated by the tasting domains only exist as a result of someone tasting that domain: Google gets a certain amount, $X from the advertiser, whenever someone clicks on an advertiser's ad, and then pays $X-Y to the person who owns the page where the ad was displayed. So Google in effect is "paid" $Y by the domain tasters, in the sense that that click was only possible as a result of the page existing.
I hope Google really does this. They need to, to restore their "don't be evil" reputation. Arguably, Google went over to the dark side when they started offering domain parking.. "Maximize revenue on your parked pages with Google AdSense for domains", they advertise. (Insert Darth Vader quote here.)
"Domain tasting" is a drain on the anti-fraud systems of the Internet. All those domain changes help conceal phishing attacks, many of which involve buying domains with stolen credit cards and exploiting them before the credit card transaction is reversed. Blacklist systems like McAfee SiteAdvisor and PhishTank are always running behind the domain changes.
We rate sites at SiteTruth, and all those domain changes are a headache for us. I'm considering taking the position that all domains less than 30 days old are junk, unless they have a good SSL certificate. Is that too severe, or a good idea? Comments?
According to the CBC they are mainly targeting so called domain kiting (repeated tasting), which will impact tasting too.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I think domain tasting has taken a turn over the years, but lets not forget why it was here in the first place.
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.
Have we as a community lost sight of what evil really is? I would agree with you that it is somewhat annoying to accidently stumble upon a link farm. But does that make it evil? Is the practice itself evil? I would say no on both counts. I think we don't give Google enough credit for accomplishing all that they have without succumbing to the predatory practices of large corporations a la Microsoft. I submit that we have really lowered the bar on what it takes to commit evil, and we should consider that a testament to the virtue of Google management.
Let's keep that in perspective. Slashdot discussions show that we don't even begin to hold our other sacred cow corporations (eg. Apple) to these extremely high standards.