Yesterday, Jay Westerdal wrote that, according to confidential sources, Google might be going to stop monetizing domains that are less than 5 days old. If they are indeed going to introduce this new policy this will most likely result in less domain tasting, although I doubt it will successfully “kill” domain tasting. It is still possible, even likely, that many domain tasters will just move their domain names to a parking company using a Yahoo feed. Still, Google’s AdSense for Domains program is the most-used PPC feed in the domain business, so any decision they make has an influence on the behavior of domain investors as well as domain tasters for sure. If anybody can stop domain tasting and domain kiting, it is the pay-per-click providers (Google, Yahoo) and the advertisers. As long as these two parties continue to pay for traffic from tasted domains, there will be no end to the practice of domain name mass-tasting. So, the question remains, will Yahoo stop monetizing newly registered domains, too?
(via Jay’s blog)
It was funny to read how Jay taken advantage of this story to broadcast the news about Oversee.net being is a domain tasting champion.
Is not Oversee.net an ICA funding member that is supposed to defend domainers, showing to the world the good practices of our industry?
**ANSWER**
Yes, I noticed that, too. Oversee.net is a platinum sponsor of the Internet Commerce Association, which has been campaigning against abusive domain tasting. Personally, I don’t how big Oversee.net’s role in domain tasting really is, but you’re right that their involvement in abusive domain tasting stands in opposition to their ICA membership. Internet REIT, another ICA founding member, has left the ICA already because of several trademark lawsuits filed against them, most prominently the Verizon lawsuit.
Yes domain tasting is a good profit but bottom line it is bad for domain industry.
Great step by google.
IMHO,
emil
**ANSWER**
I think one has to differentiate between domain tasting and the 5-day grace period. Banning the 5-day grace period altogether would be the wrong decision, in my opinion. The grace period is reasonable, because it allows you to delete a domain that you have mistakenly registered. Therefore, ICANN should introduce a policy that charges those registrants a higher fee who want to delete more than five domains at a time, for example. This way abusive domain tasting can also be stopped, because it would no longer be profitable to taste thousands or even hundreds of domain names.