Very well written and detailed post…very nice.

Loved it up to this part:

“For all of the complaining about Google, keep in mind that without Google the domain industry would be a shadow of what it currently is. Google’s ad network has propelled the parking industry to where it is today. Should we not complain about Google’s market power? Should we be thankful for what it has given us and not question its motives? It’s a tough question.”

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For me it is not a ‘tough question’.

I think the domain industry would be much better off without their ever being a Google.

It has held the domain industry as a whole, back…not moved it forward.

Without domain names, Google does not exist at all…Period.

It makes money off of other peoples property and assets for free. Great work if you can get it.

Why is it that some domain owners think “SE’s like Google and Yahoo somehow have the right(s) to own the Internet or something?

When in ‘reality’, domain name owners own the Internet…we just have allowed these companies to use us like we are their servants.

Domain names are the Internet…not Search Engines.

Just IMHO as always

Peace To All!
Dan
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BTW: @ Mike ~ Spot On!

[...] the overall percentage shared with publishers. I explained much of this in a previous post “The Google Squeeze: How Google’s Black Box Affects Partners’ Revenue“. For background you should read that article. But there are some additional relevant points [...]

At least with semi-developed sites, you have some second tier ad networks that will give you a comparable but still much lower pay out.

As advertising dollars continue to dry up over the next couple of months, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google continued to pull more and more of their advertisers from the domain space.

Time to partially develop and experiment.

[...] more to domainers, improving its overall positioning. Further, Google domain parking contracts include tiers with different revenue share rates. This acquisition may push it into a higher [...]

Of course they are sending more impressions to Google.com than the partner network. Wouldn’t you do the thing that makes you more money (all things being equal for the advertiser)? If google didn’t do this I would be more concearned with their future because I’d say they are making bad decisions. Doing otherwise is like throwing away profit.

I imagine their system does some testing and probing with each ad, and shows the ad wherever it will make the most $$$ for google. If CTR for an ad is 2% at google.com, but 80% at a partner site, you can bet they will show it at the partner, and not waste their precious screen space on a poorly converting ad on google.com. They optimize their ad impressions just like we optimize our landing pages.