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.

It’s not that the day of CPCs are dead, its just that the new analytics being used to track click quality has improved tremendously in the past 2 years.

The early domainers who exploited bots and human farms on hundreds of thousands of domain names (steal a little so nobody suspects theft) made the money. Admitted as Rick said “Thank god for fools” Those guys exploited ignorance, which was rampant with clients at that time. The word CPC was enough to convince them.

That time is coming to an end, the big boys know that. Lets all just move forward with development.

[...] To better understand how Google can squeeze its partners, it’s important to understand the deals Google has in place with partners such as DomainSponsor , NameMedia, and Sedo. These contracts are confidential. But thanks to NameMedia’s (since aborted) attempt to go public, we can peek inside a Google Adsense contract. Here are some things to note… More… [...]

Google’s primary goal is to provide end-users with results they want and click on..advertisers or not. If that means development, improved parking pages or better management of the keywords we are using. That should be the focus of all of us. After all. we do those things and we should see more revenue.