JenSense (a great blog for contextual advertising information) just pointed out that Google is now offering separate bids for search and content ads in its Adwords program. This is similar to Yahoo/Overture, which lets you set different bid amounts for an ad that results from a search and a contextual ad on a web site.
Most people find Adwords contextual advertising to have a much lower ROI than search advertising–even with Google’s “smart pricing“. What will happen to Adsense content ad revenue with this new pricing scheme? The jury is out, as Jen points out. It could go up as more advertisers start using contextual advertising or it could go down as people lower bids.
This could have a major affect on revenue from paid domain name parking services. Many parking services–including NameDrive, Sedo, and ParkingSite use Google content ads as their main source of revenue. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few months. This issue emphasizes that domain name revenue and parking is an infant industry and can be turned on its head overnight–for better or worse.
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