Domaining “Tasting” May Come to an End…

Profiting from domain names has been around as long as the Internet has been open to commercial applications. I’ve been buying and selling domains for years, at first by accident after a client didn’t want a domain they first ordered close to a decade ago. One of the most popular methods to profit from a domain is to “park” and collect revenue when someone goes to the site and clicks an advertiser’s link.

But there is an element that registers thousands if not millions of domain names to try or “taste” them for five days and return the domains to the register for a full refund yet the “tasters” still make a profit off no real investment all. Bob Parsons at Godaddy.com and Domineering Godfather Frank Schilling have been writing about this problem for sometime. Parsons has said that this causes a lot of registers pain as this keeps domains away from legitimate end users and ties up the domain registers resources and causes a loss of customers.

Today Jay Westerdal at DomainTools wrote that Google is applying new rules on publishers that place Adsense ads on their domains for revenue to close up this loop hole that has been a hot button issue in the domain world. In the article it stated a confidential source at Google said that Google will not monetizing domains that have not been registered for less than five days. Being a journalist I’m always cautious the Confidential Sources and even using the term opens the gates to roads of problems as far a creditability for anyone writer that throws the term out in the public. I really hope that this true and that other online advertising channels follows Google if it does happen. It would be much easier for the industry to police itself than to have legislation intervene.

Maybe this will also force to industry to look at parking companies next. Parking companies have by and large operated without much disclosure into how and why they pay for clicks delivered to their domain owners. Their is no transparency in the process and so there is potential for more abuse by the parking companies. One trend that is showing up is parking companies taking a new client/customer and their domains and then dropping the client citing “Poor Quality Traffic” and not paying the client for the clicks. This is basically tasting with a twist. I seen rumors of a class action lawsuit against one parking company on some message boards about this problem, but nothing concrete. I would say if parking companies and services don’t start making the process transparent there will be a lawsuit in the very near future. At the very least I think we will see that domain owners will be approaching regulatory agencies to investigate the companies.

Michael Gilmour has written some the best articles about the transparency issue. Gilmour’s survey of domain owner on transparency or issue is one of the best surveys I’ve seen. With a long cold weekend ahead of me I may re-read Michael’s study.