New Scientist reports on a study by two Harvard researchers suggesting that Google may earn as much as $500 million annually from typosquatting — those ad-filled domains that target people who mistype the domain name of popular websites.
According to New Scientist,
[Tyler] Moore and [Benjamin] Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular .com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.
They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.
If the top 100,000 websites suffer the same typosquatting rate as the sites Moore and Edelman studied, up to 68 million people a day could visit a typo site, they say. They estimate that almost 60 per cent of typo sites could have adverts supplied by Google.
If the company earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, they conclude.
Edelman is co-counsel on a lawsuit against Google by a firm seeking damages from Google for serving ads on a typosquatting domain, so he’s not a disinterested party here.
Google will stop serving ads on typosquatting domain names if the owner of the “legitimate” domain name complains, but it doesn’t pro-actively seek out such domains.
Edelman apparently wants Google to do so and notes that typosquatters tend to own hundreds or thousands of such domain names, so presumably Google could block Domain X and then also perhaps use WHOIS to find other typosquatted domain names owned by the same person. That seems like an extremely problematic solution that would be relatively easy for squatters to route around fairly easily.
If, as Edelman says, it is fairly easy to identify typosquatters, why not sue them directly, perhaps in a class action representing the presumably thousands of businesses who are allegedly harmed by this practice?