Domain Tasting is Taking a Hit from Google

The DomainTools blog is reporting that Google will be changing its Adsense policy related to domain names. Basically they will prohibit the use of Adsense on domain names that are less than five days old.

This will probably affect many companies that used to taste domains on a large scale. Right now you can register a domain and delete it within five days at no cost. Registrar and other companies, therefore, used to register millions of domain names purely for the sake of “tasting” them. They would then put Adsense on the domains, make a good money for the initial five days, keep the domains that were generating decent traffic and delete all the rest.

This practice is part of the reason why you probably have a hard time finding free domain names. Without the financial incentive, though, it is likely that many domain tasters will need to revise their strategy.

The new policy from Google alone will not solve the problem — since registrars might keep tasting domains purely to see the ones that generate high traffic — but it sure represents a move in the right direction.

Now we just need to hope that the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will take notice and act to stop this practice altogether, possibly by adding a fee to the tasted domains that are deleted within the grace period.

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