If you are anything like me you will have acquired a number of domains over the years that you are not really using to their maximum potential. In my case I usually come up with a bright idea, register the domain and then never really achieve what I had imagined.

One of the options with domains such as these was to have third party companies display advertisements on them and then cut you in on a proportion of the ad revenue. Google has now announced Adsense for domains which will allow Adsense users to display advertisements on underutilized domains. Google is currently rolling out the capability of doing this to its North American Adsense account holders.

I, for one, will be taking advantage of the feature as soon as I can, apparently the adverts convert fairly well and it means that at least I should be able to generate a little revenue from my unused domains.

What is slightly surprising is Google’s desire to do this. They are always banging on about user experience but the sort of contentless pages jammed with ad links are a terrible user experience from my perspective. If they do convert it can only be because people are anxious to get away from them as expeditiously as possible and clicking a link is faster than clicking the back arrow on the browser. To be fair to Google, they do mention adding content, but how ths pans out remains to be seen.

Filed under: Internet advertising, Pay-per-click (PPC), SEO by Martyn Whittaker