Great minds think..... disalike?
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 draws a similar connection as I do...
Scott refers to Seth Jayson's piece at the Motley Fool recently about Google's economic model "killing" the content based internet. He then makes the same connection as I do regarding Google/Yahoo's (I like to refer to them as Goohoo) support of parked pages on millions of domains. But I make the distinction between the distasteful practice of "squatting" on known trademarks and providing paid search results on generic word domain names. Scott doesn't even mention this practice and instead insists on picking on generic word domains as contributing to the death of the content based Internet:
Pay-per-click advertising is destroying the economics of content, making it more profitable to create entire sites with nothing but ads.
Why bother with the expense of creating content? Google certainly doesn’t care. And the advertisers dumping billions of dollars into AdWords and similar ad networks don’t seem to care where their ads appear. It’s all about the click.
The best defense of domain parking actually comes from Danny Sullivan in the comments, who has written about the practice before (here and here).
Direct navigation, domaining, can be akin to search by those who are entering words into their address bars to fulfill a search desire, rather than a navigational one (I want to reach a specific site). Well hey, that’s not the search engines’ problem that people do this. You don’t get to photography.com by entering only “photography” into IE or Firefox. You have to consciously think, hmm, I want something about photography — I know — I’ll put photography + .com together. That’s not a smart user choice, in my view — but it’s a user choice, not your choice, not my choice nor something they were forced or tricked to do. And if it isn’t working well, then guess what? People will stop doing it. So the system will correct itself.
