The Inside AdSense blog made a big announcement yesterday saying that AdSense for Domains, the much controversial feature set that has been offered for several years to a select group of publishers, has been open to all publishers.
We suspect that this has something to do with Google's fear of the economy -- lately, with Google allowing bidding on hard liquor and beer, they certainly are becoming more lax in terms of what they can do to make a quick buck. (Some suspect that firearm ads are around the corner.) Barry highlights the various monetization opportunities that Google has become more open with, and it is obvious that Google really is trying to capitalize on a poor economy.
But he's not happy about this. With AdSense for Domains, you have a serious issue with quality. When it was just open to a few people, you found reports that people lost $20k+ to garbage traffic. The problem is that Google is indexing these domains that are severely lacking in content and are putting it under the "we want to make this a great searching experience." Some people can see through the facade and think that Google is trying to make it a great moneymaking experience instead. After all, a search drives an unsuspecting visitor to a domain with bad content but possibly relevant ads and they click on those ads, thereby making Google some serious dough if done repeatedly. One member calls this action "degrad[ing] the value of the internet."
If Google would do the right thing, it's that they'd remove these domains from searches. But chances are they really are greedy for some money. Unfortunately that's at a lot of poorer people's expense.
You better also hope that some good domains don't get taken so that publishers can make a quick buck too, but chances are we're too late for that.
As so many people say in the WebmasterWorld thread, this is Google's way of polluting the internet. This is Google's way of ignoring real concerns and introducing more problems. And people still wonder when and if Google will heed the AdSense requests made by publishers. With this low blow, we suppose not.
More sentiment follows:
Thank you, Google, for further polluting the web. Thank you, Google, for making domain names even further unavailable for real development. Thank you, Google, for strangling the online world. Thank you, Google, for not listening to us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This means that there will be more junk domains to block from my AdWords campaigns. (And I'm already blocking more than 400 useless, junk domains.)
Google tries hard to hear what we, the publishers, want. Yet in the background planned the biggest kick in the guts that I have seen for a long time. It makes a mockery of everything here.
So, Google, what do you say for yourself?
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
