Google to kill Domain Tasting

January 24th, 2008
by Jay Westerdal


A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less then five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is a time period when registrars can delete a domain at no cost, but in this time frame a registrant could register millions of these temporary domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them. The result is the ability to produce millions of temporary websites that literally generate millions of dollars in income per week for Google.

It was disclosed in court that one of Google’s partners was generating as much as 3 million dollars a month from the practice, and that was after Google’s revenue share. Oversee.net and other companies have been using this practice for years and it will have a direct impact on them. The gravy train of free money might be coming to a halt very fast. This policy change at Google should be announced to the channel partners soon and it will have a huge echoing impact on the Industry.

The good news is the quantity of advertising will now be spread among fewer domains. If bid prices start to rise as a result of this change, domain owners who actually own real, full domains should receive more money. 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 un-served ads.


More at: DomainTools Blog

The term "Domain Tasting" caught my attention. Never heard of it till today. Seems like a lot of work cancelling and renewing a purchase every 5 days but obviously it's been very lucrative for some unorthodox players.

It's about DARN time. This is the best news I've heard regarding Ads this year so far.

The MFA (made for Adsense) sites have crippled the honest sites out there, and this is wonderful news.

I've always wondered how in a 5-day period anyone could get people to their website, but I guess with enough domains, and enough folks surfing and putting in the wrong domains, it adds up.

More on MFA and what they've done. It's basically a search results page turned into HTML and then hosted on your server. If you make enough of them, say 300, even at a dollar a day you could make thousands.

http://jasonkolb.typepad.com/weblog/2006/05/web_20_may_save.html