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 Analytics illegal in Germany?

According to reports, the state privacy commissioner in Hamburg, Germany, has decided that Google Analytics should be illegal.

"The free internet service Google Analytics gathers detailed information about website visits via a user’s IP address, sending the data back to Google servers in the United States for processing.

"According to the paper [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung], Caspar and data protection officials in other German states believe this practice should be illegal."

Apparently they intend fining German websites that use Analytics (despite it not being illegal yet). It's like something from the siege of Helengrad.

Let's hope this doesn't spread, because once they take Analytics off us, they will be back for Adsense next, then possibly Piwik

Sources

• The Local (An English language German news site)
• Search engine land blog