We are all guilty of it, it’s very easy to quickly type something into the address bar of your browser and hit enter before you realise that you have made a typing error. For example if your quickly typing in “Facebook.com” you may accidently type in “Favebook.com” and if you hit enter you will find yourself on a page full of adverts, and this is where Google make their money.
According to a study at Harvard University, Google could be raking in some $497 Million a year from people simply typing topographical errors that mimic similar sites into the address search bar. This practice is known as “Typosquatting”, which is when people register domain names similar to existing ones and when a user lands on it they are presented with a page of adverts.
Moore and Edelman used a list of common spelling mistakes to generate another list of possible typo domains for the 3,264 most popular “.com” websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings.
They study estimates that 0.60% of uses who type in Google.com make an error. This may seem like a small amount, but when you consider that Google.com gets an average of 425060000 a day, it means that there is 2566230 daily visitors who land on typo sites, and that’s a lot!
With help from software, the researchers crawled 285,000 of some 900,000 “misspelled” sites to estimate what revenue the domains are generating. When we have a look at some of those results we see that some serious cash was made.
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!
The researchers estimate that almost 60% of these sites have ads supplied by Google who make their money from adverts. With a bit of simple maths that works out at about $497 million per year in revenue. However it’s up to Google remove ads from these “misspelled” domains if the owner of the original site complains, but I’m sure Google wouldn’t be to pushed to remove ads from sites that are making them lots of money.
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