Google Closes Adsense For Domains

Google have announced that they are closing Adsense For Domains, their domain parking solution. They've had a lot of complaints about running a domain parking service at all and although they have stared down those complaints, I guess this will make their life easier

Their service has never really fired, it's always been the poor cousin of their other services and has never produced good results for me. I was getting a slightly higher PPC from them than from other providers, but their click rate was a lot worse and looking at their templates it's fairly easy to see why.



Google's announce timeframe is:

March 21

Users will no longer be able to create new Hosted domains. Hosted domain channels will also be read-only as of this date.

April 18

Hosted domains will become inactive, stop serving ads and cease accruing earnings and it’ll no longer be possible to earn from them. Domain settings and channels will still be accessible, but will be read-only in AdSense.

June 27

Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts

April 18, 2013

Performance reports will no longer be be available.

I'm not sure what the June 27 entry means, presumably it would mean that we'll no longer be able to view history except that's coming on April 18 2013, but the other dates are pretty clear. All domains will need to be off the service by mid April.

They have provided instructions for how to move to another parking provider.  Pretty basic and generic data but I do find their suggestions for selecting a parking provider very naive.

• "Contact your registrar for domain parking options.
• "Search Google for "park my domains" to see a list of popular domain parking options.

For people who have been around domain parking a while this is unnecessary, for people who haven't and will need some advice I can't see either of these options giving the domain owner much help selecting a good option for their domains. On the other hand, when I ran their suggested search, the first result was a registrar's non-monetized solution, Namedrive came up second, Godaddy and Sedo were close behind, then a four year old Digital Point forum discussion on selecting parking providers about 1/2 way down the page.

I only had 5 domains with them, so I I'll just move the domains to Namedrive which is what I should have done when I discovered Google wasn't doing very well for them. I kept them there as I wanted a performance comparison.