Sean Walther's Blog

Got unused domain names? – Try Google Adsense for Domains

I never knew I could take some of my unused domains, and hand them over to Google (why do I even link “Google”?  Who doesn’t know where Google is?) to try and monetize some of the wasted traffic.

Looking through Google’s Adsense interface earlier this week I found a new option — Google Adsense for Domains.  

I’m not an advocate of parking domain names.  If you happen to have some extra domains sitting around it’s a great idea.  

The steps are simple:

1. Create an Adsense account - https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Purchase Domains (if you don’t already have them)
3. Setup the Domain for use with Adsense for Domains (there’s a guide at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100301&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link)
4. Add Unused Domains to Adsense
5. Modify domain registrar settings (setup a blank A record to the IP 216.239.32.21, and setup a CNAME “www” record pointing to pub-xxxxxxxxxxx.afd.ghs.google.com, where “xxxxxxxxxxx” is your provisioned Adsense ID)
6. Request Approval of the domain from Google (they are very helpful)
7. Configure some basic options (color, channel names, keywords if you want to hint the ads in a specific direction)
8. Profit

It is important to note that you can only do this with a domain that you don’t use for any other google hosting services (such as Sites, Apps, etc).

For me it’s been worth it.  I made $0.32 today that I wouldn’t have otherwise made.  

The best part is just to see how many people visit your defunct domains.  I love knowing how many people are just typing in a domain, or linking to it on accident.

I haven’t figured out how to run both this service, and Google Analytics.

Tags: AdSense, Adsense for Domains, Analytics, CNAME, Google, Parked Domain, registrar