Just as usual, giant companies with lots of cash are always the subject of class action for whatever reasons.

So, let's see. A company offering "1) Resolution of International Contract and Trade Disputes through Litigation & Arbitration, 2) Corporate Immigration, 3) Foreign investment in economic & technological development zones, and 4) Investment in international corporations and entry into the US Stock Market Exchange" spends a hundred bucks on internet campaign directed to random internet surfers, and are surprised that not a single one of them happened to be involved in international trade disputes, foreign investments in development zones, or entry into the US stock market exchange that day?

Does this mean that a company like GoDaddy will be part of the class action suit because they have information about parked domain advertising? Funny how those who appear to be the most powerful (according to their business card anyway) are the first to burst into tears because their instant gratification didn't happen, or they didn't get to leach as much off of the public as they wanted. This is one time I stand behind Google 100%.

Shady, yes. But probably profitable. I think that Google is too entrenched in this market to pull out without suffering some revenue loss. After today's earnings announcement they don't need any more bad press (but 39% growth is still pretty good!).

Hopefully they will wise up and get out of the parked domains market sooner rather than later to remove the incentive for domainers and kiters. However, once Google is gone somebody else will be more than happy to serve ads on such large numbers of parked domains. So, even if Google does pull out, the end user probably won't notice too much of a difference in the long run.

What just astounds me is that people are actually surprised when they don't any make money off of ads on a parked domain. Personally, when I hit a parked domain that has ads, I see it as nothing more than a lame attempt to grab money without providing any value in the site, so I move on. Being one who runs a hobby Web site containing Google ads, I certainly don't expect people to just click the ads because they are there. It's all about the content. If I don't update my site, I see a drop-off in ad revenue. Keep it fresh, and the numbers go up. It's that simple. Granted, I'm using AdSense, not AdWords, but the concept still holds. People need a reason to click on an ad--just because it happens to be there is a very poor reason.

Now, if Google claimed something that they could not deliver, then that's one thing, but just because some loser didn't get the conversions he thought he should get, too bad. Try actively doing something with the site instead of lazily sponging off of others.

> What just astounds me is that people are actually
> surprised when they don't any make money off of ads
> on a parked domain.

In this case though that's kind of the point of the guy who sued. He didn't make money off of the parked ads, but didn't know how to disable showing them on such*. The people who owned the parked domains *did* make some money in this case (25 clicks, but I suppose there's more in it for them than just a single ad customer).

*From the complaint: "Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs."

Ok. that makes sense to the extent that if Google makes it difficult to opt out, then that's simply bad business.

It still makes me laugh at people's expectations. It would be like me posting a sign on some random telephone pole with the expectation that people would respond to my offer, and then moaning because no one responded.

Parked domains are typically (but obviously not always) intended to do nothing more than provide a placeholder where ads can be posted. I have no problem with people parking a domain for later use, but parking for the intent of generating an ad is pretty lame in my book. Then again, maybe that's why I'm not a rich Internet entrepreneur....

Google ads on search result pages have value, but, to the actual advertiser, ads on Google's "content network" is of little value. There have been discussions of this on Search Engine Watch.

10% of web users create 50% of the clicks, and those people will click on anything while buying little. So if you're advertising anything with a significant price tag, you don't want to be on the Content Network.

As more advertisers realize this and turn off ads on the Content Network (which is a hard to find checkbox), ad value there goes down. This is hitting "social networking" sites hard. In particular, most of the ads on Myspace seem to be from "bottom-feeder" sites. We rate ad sites at SiteTruth.com and track AdWords ads as our AdRater users see them, and about 38% of Google's advertisers are "bottom-feeders" with no identifiable real-world business behind the ad.

Google has been upping their "site quality" standards, although not very far. Most of the "made for adwords" pages have been dropped. Marchex, which has a site for most zip codes (like www.90406.com) still has their pages up, but they won't come up in a Google search.