Every Good Domain Is Taken. Here’s Why.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
Every Good Domain Is Taken. Here’s Why. Niall Kennedy on the apparently lucrative business of domain name squatting.
A simple site targeting wedding shoes earns Han’s business about $9,100 a year. Not bad for a $8 domain purchase and what he reports and about $7 in maintenance costs per year.
This is absolutely amazing. I urge anyone building web sites to read this article. This is not why we put Adsense on this and other sites although it sure has me drooling. Still, it’s a fascinating tale of what a bit of knowledge can do for you.
The question is, how does one feel about putting content-less sites up just to serve up ads for clicking? Or, put another way, how does one feel about putting sites up where the ads are the content?
(Source Daring Fireball Linked List.)
Or how does one feel about clicking on a search result and ending up on one of these sites that has no content except for a bunch of ad links to other sites? I back-out immediately and never click through. I’m already disappointed that I’ve contributed to the site’s traffic numbers, but won’t click through even if I think there’s a decent lead there. I’ll reconfigure my original search instead.
In my opinion, this something bad which has grown from the Google ad programs. I hate hitting those pages, though I understand why people build them. To me, they are just another type of bloatware.
Dale: well, I have to say it’s not that simple. Some ad arrays that come from adsense are useful and so, how skillfull one is at building such arrays and making sure the right indexable content is there is meaningful. I’m not implying that this guy does this or that many of these sites do it, but some places I’ve gone that are loaded with ads are not that bad and the ads add to the information to scan through.
I agree though, blurring the line between ads and content is odd and feels imoral in many ways. Oh well, we’re descriminating consumers… hopefully.
Richard: right, many of these “sites” are worse than others. Some even offer an array of ad links which are seemingly unrelated to one’s original search.
For me, the irritation comes from what I perceive as “bait and switch”. At least with Nextag and others I know that I’m going to be visiting a consolidator’s site if I choose. But if I click on “TheRubberBoatDepot.com” (or whatever) and get ten ads for wallpaper, rubber bands, and office supplies instead of inflatable water-craft, I’m not impressed with the process or the ethics.
I do admit that I have seen others that were actually targeted much more usefully, but I still prefer to do my own “refining” via search wording or syntax. Having a higher percentage of these types of sites turn up in search results just wastes time (in most cases) and may push the link one really needs to a page further back.
Sigh… such is “progress”.
Dale, Hey, who am I to talk, I have dog food ads on “downward facing dog” yoga shot pages. ;)
dale and ricchard,
The question is — who is “more bad”‘? These people who have found a way to profit off of our mistypig or the site owners that are desperate enough for exposure/traffic that they will pay to be listed for a keyword? In other words, there would be no ads to show/money to be made if the ads were not bought.
I can tell you from experience, if you have good, well structured content, the google ranking will take care of itself and will never have to pay for eyeballs.
What is really fascinating is to look at is the way that the search engines share data and how that has evolved over time (see http://www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm)
I would argue that adsense is nothing more than http://www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm that is more easily usable on small sites.
just my $.02