Internet search engine giants Google have been touted as the main beneficiaries of these web addresses that set out to mimic typographical errors in existing websites with a potential earnings projection of $497 million studies have shown.

Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University conducted the study on the aptly named practise “typosquatting”. They have predicted that Google could make such a substantial amount of money down to its network of display ads that run on many of these mimic websites, Google of course get a cut of any profit made from such ads.

Let me give you an example, take Google, how often do you think it is misspelled “Googgle”? If someone was to buy this as a domain name they would more then likely get a fairly high percentage of visitors intending to go to the Google homepage. Many of these sites use Google ads as a way to make revenue, anytime one of these ads are used Google get paid, a pretty easy half a billion dollars then.

A small study by ZDNet found the following: “Expanding to the top 100,000 sites, retaining the 0.7% estimated ratio of typosquatting site, we estimate that typo domains collectively receive at least 68.2 million daily visitors. If these typo domains were treated as a single website, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 10th most popular website in the world. It would be more popular, in unique daily visitors, than twitter.com, myspace.com, or amazon.com!”

Edelman and Moore estimate that 60% of these “typosquatting” websites use Google ads, without boring you with the maths they have estimated that this amounts to roughly $497 million.

As co-council for a law firm currently suing Google after their ads appeared on a misspelled domain of the firms website Edelman may have been somewhat bias in his findings although he promises otherwise.

Google do state, however that they will remove any ads from misspelled domains upon request of the original sites owner.

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Now however, the process only takes thirty minutes and you can designate as many as 500 URLs to ban from your site. This update has been coming for a while and is hugely necessary since, particularly because of the way the content network works, site owners often find themselves displaying ads from competitors. Obviously, you don’t want to do that for a moment longer than is necessary.

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AdSense for domains is a fairly simple system that allows you to make money off your domain names even before you develop them into full-blown websites. Basically what happens is this, when someone goes to your undeveloped web page they see relevant adverts from Google and you receive a fee from clicks as normal – a similar service to this is offered by many other domain name sellers.

However, unless your URL is a popular keyword, the sort of thing that people will type into an address bar assuming there must be a site with that name, you’re unlikely to make much money. The real appeal of AdSense for Domains, as far as I can see, is that it provides an alternative to a horrible empty page or, even worse, an ugly 404 not found message greeting browsers before your site is up, which can only be a good thing.

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In an email to its users Yahoo explained themselves thus,

“The decision to close Content Match underlines our commitment to focus on our Sponsored Search and Display business and to simplify our solutions to deliver a high ROI for our advertisers.”

This is clearly evidence of how bad things are at Yahoo, but we’ve known that for months. More urgent for the consumer is the fact that this move will drastically weaken the Yahoo Publisher Network, the closest thing to an Adsense competitor there is. What’s more, if this is the first step of a move to roll out this initiative across the company, then Yahoo are about to basically hand Google ownership of online contextual advertising.

It doesn’t take a degree in economics to know that monopolies are bad for customers, since a lack of competition removes the incentive to provide good customer service and low prices. Come on Yahoo, pull yourself together!

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