“hosted” Adsense for Domains program — Google kills

Program introduced in 2008 will be phased out.

Google is ending its Adsense for Domains program that allowed users of its online Adsense program to park their domain names.

The firm recommends that clients migrate their parked domain names to a domain name parking firm. A message sent to effected publishers this morning includes a link to a migration guide, although that link does not appear functional at this time. [Update: the link now works.]

Here’s how the program will wind down:

March 21: You’ll no longer be able to create fresh Hosted domains
April 18: Hosted domains will become inactive and it’ll no longer be possible to earn from them
June 27: Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts

Google launched the self-serve program in 2008, much to the chagrin of Google’s domain parking feed partners.

Initial fears by these partners were unfounded, as the self-service solution never had the muscle to compete with the third party solutions. Its optimization was basic and parking domains with it at first required changing A records and CNAME records rather than simply changing nameservers. It also had limited templates, although it later added more.

[The original headline for this article referred to “Direct Adsense for Domains” program. The “Direct” terminology is actually part of the program that remains, so I have changed the title to reflect Google’s term “hosted”.]