If you are struggling with making just US$ 145.63 or US$ 297.12 a month from Google AdSense, you will think it is not fair that others are making US$ 6,681.34 or even US$ 86,234.78 a month and are not even paying for their domains! Well, it seems Google thinks that's not a fair business model either.

What is “Domain Tasting” all about?

Domain tasting, is a practice using a 5-day grace period at the beginning of a domain registration that allows the registrant to test the domain name for marketability. This means, if you don't like it during those 5 days, you give it back and get a refund.

But how did it all start?

After the “.com bust” and corresponding stock crash in 2000/2001 anything related to Internet — including domain names — were perceived as worthless. Later in 2001 and 2002 IAregistry.com (now Spirit Telecom) and DotRegistrar.com allowed a small group of large clients to bulk register thousands of domains, test them for profitability and only pay for those they keep. The earliest document I found at ICANN.org on this matter is from February 2002 (↑).

I received a great comment for my last post Adsense Is Bad For Marketing by Stephen Cronin of his Blog

Scratch 99 - More Than Scratch The Surface (↑).

You'll remember my post was about the pitfalls with Adsense. Here is Stephen's comment again.



Stephen Cronin (↑) writes about web development using PHP, MySQL, CSS, Javascript, Ajax & about blogging via WordPress.

What I found of immediate interest for me on his Blog were the articles:

• How To Avoid Smart Pricing On Blogs (↑)
  
  
• The Adsense Dilemma (Or How To Make Money) (↑)
  
  
• WordPress Plugin - DualFeeds v1.11 Released (↑)
  
  
• IFrameWidgets (↑): Stop slow JavaScript widgets breaking your page layout!

Just to name a few. Thanks Stephen for your comment.

Yours
John W. Furst

It appears to me that AdSense seems to be one of the first choices for monetizing any Web site, including Blogs. People seem to get very enthusiastic about it — having the big, fat checks of Joel Comm (↑) and Shoemoney (↑) in memory and some other stories that sounded like, “Wow, Google just paid me 5 bucks (US$) for each click on my site!”

Of course that sounds great. But isn't the reality a little bit different.

• Not everybody gets 5 dollar a click and certainly not every time.
• How many clicks do you get anyway and at what range?
• And are you happy with your click-through-rate (CTR)?
• By the way: Since the US-dollar is devalued so much, anybody outside the US-dollar currency looses additionally.

I mentioned the CTR (click-through-rate) for a specific reason. Google observes the average CTR of your entire AdSense Account as well as other factors of your sites with AdSense on it. In gerneral this is referred to as “Google AdSense Smart Pricing Strategy” “Google” for it, if you are interested in the details.

Bottom Line: If you have sites with an average CTR below 2%, you are simply not treated as a publisher of quality content. That means Google will not pay you the regular, full amount for each click.

That's supposed to be beneficial for the advertisers. Fortunately all you need to do in order to regain normal status of your AdSense account is to completely remove AdSense from the sites that have CTR below 2% (make it 3% to be on the safe side). It should take a week till your status is restored.

Regular readers of my Blog will remember that I had AdSense on it for some time. However CTR was very low and it seems that other Blogs with Internet Business/Marketing related content have the same problems. It seems to be a market that does not really work for AdSense.

“AdSense does not work for Blogs with a focus on Internet Business, Internet Marketing.”

Anyway: Should you want that people leave your site? It's kind of counterproductive, if you write quality content. So you have to decide what you want to do:

• Do you want people to read what you write?
  
• Or do you want people to click away for some bucks?
  

What is your opinion on this matter? Leave a comment below. Let us know!

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: An excellent treatment of the same subject can be found on Courtney Cuttle's Blog: How To get Worthless Adsense Clicks (↑)