One of the driving forces behind increased interest in domain names is pay-per-click advertising. Pay-per-click listings are the number one revenue source for domain parking services such as DomainSponsor.
GoTo, which later became Overture and now Yahoo! Search Marketing, pioneered the pay-per-click industry. But Google quickly dominated with its Adwords program. A key difference between Yahoo and Google was the length of ads. Google ads have a short 25 word title followed by two lines of up to 35 characters of text. Yahoo ads are much longer: 40 character title and 190 character description.
Apparently shorter ads get more clicks. Yahoo Search Marketing has just announced that it will truncate ads on Yahoo.com to show only part of the ad text. At first the ads will be shortened to 70 characters, but this number might be adjusted in the future.
This could have implications for paid domain parking services that use Yahoo ads, such as GoldKey. Changes in ad length served to parking pages could lead to increased clicks — and increased cash for domain name owners.
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