Wasted domains?
The Domaintools blog has a post dated July 1st, lamenting the potential income that various banks and finance companies are losing by not resolving their generic names.
They provide homeloans.com and retire.com as examples of addresses that could “generate several thousands of dollars” if they were “parked” (aka place website advertising billboards designed to appear like webportals on the addresses and generate ad revenue from every “stumble view”). Alternately, they suggest redirecting the sites to the owner’s primary sites which would provide millions of dollars in lost referral revenue.
As a web user and 13-year domain name owner, the fact that 99% of domain names registered today are returned within a 5-day refund window by domain tasters because they learn the site can’t earn enough ad revenue from stumble views to recoup the registration fee ($6 or so) pisses me off.
Of the remaining one percent, I’m guessing that 99% of those completed registrations are by these ad portal “domainers” who are betting that they can make a better return on the name than $6.
Chances are, if you owned a website in the last 10 years and let the domain registration lapse, one of these parasitic ad portals now greets visitors at your old address. The “domainer” is collecting ad revenue from stumble views generated by visitors who thought your website was still there based upon the lingering links from other sites.
I think “domainers” should be paying for the significant resources they waste while testing if a domain can attract more than $6 worth of ad revenue from “stumble views”. Tens of millions of spurious registrations and deletions are happening every month and the cost of this infrastructure is paid for by all domain registrants — the majority of whom feel lucky enough to have been able to register a name that approximates their business name, product, service, personal name or some aspect of their personality.
I wish the Web wasn’t being clear cut only to be replaced with millions of ad billboards, but with Google, Yahoo and other opportunistic ad services feeding the ad billboard and “stumble view revenue” business models and mentality, we’re going to end up with one nasty noisy web full of meaningless ad portals.
What does this have to do with the banks and finance companies with the “wasted great generic domains”? There is no such thing as a wasted domain.
The silence of a 404 is much more comforting to me than ad billboards that waste my time with crap. Hopefully, one day someone will develop a tool to engineer all of this web pollution out and away from the browsing experience.