Domains Take On the Economy - Something You Wouldn't Expect
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Earlier I discussed the importance of PPC and direct navigation to the monetization of domains. If anything were to happen that might disrupt either of those methods, domains could be in a world of trouble. Oh wait! Bad news my friends. Google has come from outside the registrar community to absolutely pwn the domain tasting community. According to this blog by Jay Westerdal, “A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less than five days old.” And just days later, ICANN moved to eliminate the Add Grace Period (AGP) completely along with making their 20 cent fee per domain per year nonrefundable. It's items 5 and 6 on the report.
Who knows if Google influenced ICANN or vice versa. What is known is that PPC is pretty much entirely dependent on Google Adsense for Domains, because domain tasters can purchase millions of domains, add Google Adsense, and delete them with a full a refund before the AGP, but not before Google and the domain owners reap 100% profit from the advertisers. The Westerdal blog had this to say:
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.
When it comes to direct navigation, Jeftovic had another interesting speculation regarding the outside influence Google had with PPC: what if Google, or whoever, puts some kind of search tool where the location box is? What if you didn't need to type in a top-level domain (TLD) to access a website? Google would seemingly be able to take over from here. Frankly, I'm getting tired of having to figure out what the specific domain is. I'm tired of being redirected to a site not selling steel support structures when I type in superiorrods.com instead of .net. [For what it's worth, neither domain actually exists at the time of writing, but that's besides the point. --Ed.].
As you can see, both the people in PPC and direct navigation have almost no control over where their business is going. However there is a way for those in the industry to get as much out of it as they can before the real damage starts.
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