The Hypocrisy of Google's User Experience Policies

Explain this — Google is penalizing AdWords advertisers “who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages,” and yet Google just signed a deal with GoDaddy.com to run AdSense on parked domains (via JenSense):

Now, GoDaddy is offering customers the ability to run AdSense for Domains on their parked pages – for a fee – and those customers can then make money from the ads on the parked pages. Essentially, GoDaddy will share a cut of the click revenue with their customers, but will charge customers a fee for the privelege.

The program is called CashParking. And the monthly fee is scaled depending on what percentage of GoDaddy’s revenue you want to keep. It is worth noting that GoDaddy is sharing the revenue they earn from Google, so Google will still be earning money from each click on a parked domain page.

Here’s how Google describes its AdSense for Domains program:

AdSense® for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google’s semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names. Our program uses ads from the Google AdWords™ network, which is comprised of thousands of advertisers worldwide and is growing larger everyday. Google AdSense for domains targets web sites in over 25 languages, and has fully localized segmentation technology in over 10 languages.

And here’s the fantastic user experience that you get:

There’s a reason why in 2Q06 Google had a profit of $721 million on $2.46 billion in revenues — but it has nothing to do with “providing a great user experience” (good old Google search notwithstanding).