URL typos amount to big earnings for Google
I am sure many of you, like me, have habitually typed in the web address of one of your most frequently visited sites only to realise that your usual flawless typing has failed you and in your haste you have misspelled the URL (Googgle instead of Google). You then realise that instead of getting the usual ‘unrecognized URL’ error you are actually whisked off to a rather basic but evidently intentional website.
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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February 23rd, 2010 at 6:17 pm
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