Click To Hit

Wow, take a look at this:

On Domain Monetization

We note that there is a meaningful difference between Domain Tasting and Domain Monetization. Monetization is a straightforward arbitrage between the cost of domain registrations and the revenue from as much pay-per-click traffic as the domain owner can get from people who visit web sites in the domain. It’s a fundamentally sleazy business, since the web sites have no useful content and the way they get the traffic is basically by tricking people, either via typos or recently expired domains. More importantly, the presence of such website makes web-surfing by ordinary users far more difficult and confusing than they should be.

We do not think it is appropriate in this case to make ICANN as a regulator to watch and prohibit the Domain Monetization practices per se. Instead, on behalf of ordinary Internet users, we call upon those commercial enterprises such as Google or Overture to take appropriate measures such as to stop paying for clicks on pages with no content, thereby dealing with a problem that is not limited to typo and expired domains. We’ve seen click arbitrage, people buying Google ads to drive traffic to pages that are simply other Google ads. This kind of self-generating traffic for pay-per-click advertising is confusing and unnecessary for ordinary Internet users and, in the long run, not healthy for the development of Internet as a whole.

Since Domain monetization is a relatively new phenomena, the impact to the ordinary users and the wider Internet community is hard to measure at this point. It seems clear, however, that it does not improve the user experience at all. We think it is worth to keep watching on how it develops and may seek for specific actions when we have clearer understanding of measurable impact.

I haven’t read anything in recent years that didn’t shock me with its ignorance and arrogance more than these three paragraphs. It’s obvious to me this group has no idea of the impact or value Direct Navigation brings to the search market or to Google and Yahoo’s bottom line. Direct Navigation is a true form of search; it’s a way for a user to find a search term through the address bar of their browser without having to wade through pages and pages of organic search spam to find what they’re looking for. Although Typo’s and Expired traffic is an exploited portion of the market that has ethical concerns that need addressing, it is a small portion and doesn’t come close to outweighing the benefits the larger percentage of true generic domain monetization pages bring to the search space.

Thankfully there are groups being put together to fight this ignorance …