Last chance for parking: Google Adsense for Domains
Google recently launched Adsense for Domains, allowing domain owners to park their names directly with Google, thus avoiding the ‘middle man’, i.e. the parking company. Whether this results in increased revenue share for the domainer is unclear as Google do not reveal their cut. Logic says it shouldn’t hurt the domainer’s revenue share.
I have long moved on to from domain parking to development as a revenue model – you really need to own a very large number of premium dotcoms for parking to be a real revenue stream – but I still have a few hundred undeveloped domains, so I decided to park about 170 of my domains with Google.
Typically for Google, setting up the domains is not as easy as changing the nameservers. You have to change the CNAME records and create four A records in order to have your Adsense for Domains activated.
The upside is that your Adsense publisher ID is directly imprinted in the CNAME record so once you get things set up, there is no ownership verification and no additional steps before you start collecting revenue.
The downside is that changing these records may not always be easy. My domains are registered with Moniker, and I created a Template for this using the Template Manager – supposedly an easy way to change records in bulk.
For some reason, though, the CNAME record change never took effect and the domains were not verified by Google. I double and triple checked everything to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes, and then resorted to contacting my account manager. Helpful as ever, he responded fast and forwarded the inquiry to the tech guys over at Moniker.
The tech guys must have been hibernating because it took about 2 weeks to get them to actually do anything about this. In the end, they did manage to create a working template, but forgot to add 3 out of the 4 A records, which I proceeded to add on my own today. I had Google recheck the domains today and finally they are functional.
Apropos, Moniker tech support is the slowest that I’ve come across. That is to say, they are slow when they react, and many times have not responded at all. Last year I submitted several support tickets that were never answered in any way. Things did get better when I was assigned a Premium Account Manager recently, and I can always harrass him about my support requests.
Anyway, back to Google Adsense for Domains. The pages look very minimalistic, and I suppose that’s been found an effective strategy for parking. Here’s an example of one of my domains:
Like I said, I’ve long moved on from parking and started developing my domain names. My general strategy is to develop those domain names that don’t make any profit parked, and leave parked – for now – the ones that do well when parked. This way I aim to make every single domain name profitable. The names I moved to Google Adsense for Domains all get a trickle of traffic, but the type-in traffic is so low that given the recent decline in parking revenue, they don’t even earn their registration fee each year.
Let’s see if Google Adsense for Domains can deliver higher CPC. If not, I’m just going to develop these babies as well.
Posted: April 10th, 2009 under domain parking, make money.
Tags: adsense, domain parking, domains, google, parking
Comments
Comment from bgAds
Time May 12, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Thanks for your opinions re: AFD. The Comment at bottom by the other AFD user, boy oh boy, sounds very depressing, which is mainly the same as I am hearing round about searching for what people have experienced so far with AFD.
Total bummer as I had such high hopes. ;-/
What if you don’t even make $100 in one year, will google even pay you? (I think their Terms say they will pay once you reach $100).
And should one use their own “brand” domains in AFD? These are “brand names” I made up for myself to hopefully start a few small businesses in the future, but why let the domains sit idle until then?
Then again, I have not copyrighted/trademarked those names yet, so would people steal the names for their own business or corporation? (of course they would not be able to buy the domain name as I own it). But they could use the name for their company, etc.
OR, are only “commercial generic” domain names supposed to be used in Adsense for Domains?
Many thanks!
Comment from juno
Time October 13, 2009 at 6:00 pm
If you have a good domain name you should recieve natural traffic to your site. I have one domain that gets over 100 hits a day and was never registered before. It only makes about a dollar a day, but that more than pays for itself and 35 other domains a year. I see it as a way to offset the cost of investments that are still waiting to be developed. If anyone is wondering what a page looks like google has an Example Page here.
Comment from kfink
Time April 17, 2009 at 12:29 am
I also parked a large number of (lesser-valued) domains with Google…and, while they never fetched much elsewhere, they’re really not making much more now. In fact, most probably make less.
A question: I recently went in to edit keywords (what I thought was useful optimization) and I seem to be getting less click-throughs than before. Certainly less revenue on the names I optimized.
Do you or anyone else reading this know what the deal is? Is it possible I am being penalized, or…maybe the domains are just shitty?
[An example: "NintendoReviews.com" had made a little bit at first; then nothing after awhile. So I optimized keywords using the Adwords Keywords tool; and...I don't think those keywords ever got implemented on the parked page! Certainly didn't help revenue...]
Anyway, any advice or help from anyone is MUCH appreciated…thanks