Here’s the good news: Google’s found another way to raise some money. Here’s the bad: its behavior is raising a few eyebrows. The search engine giant has achieved both these things by extending AdSense for domains to more publishers.
AdSense for domains allows publishers and Google to monetize undeveloped pages; ads, links, and search results all get displayed. Due to the new development, English-language developers throughout North America will get their shot at using the product. Additional expansions should bring a lot more people into the fold soon enough.
A post on the Inside AdSense blog also states, “To ensure positive user experience and the quality of our network, these sites are monitored for policy compliance and prohibited from using text and images designed to confuse users.”
But Barry Schwartz writes, “You have to understand that AdSense for Domains, formerly known as Domain Park, is a product that has always been extremely controversial in the ad space market. Since 2005 and likely before then, Danny Sullivan has called for major reform of the product, because it delivered poor quality traffic . . . . Not only that, we have reported lawsuit after lawsuit over the product and even with the reformed opt out feature, it still has resulted in more lawsuits.”
Google may be getting to the point where it’s pushing too hard for profits. If the company has to cross a lot of lines in order to hit financial forecasts, shareholders will have less to celebrate. If it still misses after making questionable decisions, silver linings will be hard to find indeed.
