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:

www.boliviaecotourism.com

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.