Typosquatting

How Typosquatters Make Money

Typosquatting is extremely profitable for its practitioners and has evolved into an organized and large-scale phenomenon today. As seen in our previous Direct Navigation report, the pay-per-click advertising business model used in most cases of typosquatting generates millions of dollars for its most sophisticated masterminds. In order to understand the risk and impact that typosquatting poses to your brand, we begin by identifying the main drivers of typosquatting revenue: targeted site traffic and quality of the misspelled name.

Traffic

Typosquatters rely on the mistakes users make when entering names into their browsers’ address bars. CitizenHawk Inc., a digital brand management company, claims that up to 20% of all hand-typed URLs are misspelled.¹ However, it is important to remember that the effectiveness of a registered domain is not substantiated by its mere existence. The main revenue driver for typosquatted domains is the traffic that the correctly spelled domain name (target site) receives. For example, fairwindspartners.com is the target site and fairwindpartners.com (with the “s” after “fairwind” dropped) is the typo domain. Pay-per-click advertising is the most frequent practice used by typosquatters to monetize their domains. The amount of people who end up on typosquatted sites is a key factor in driving profits, since a percentage of visitors to these sites typically click on at least one link, which generates revenue for the domain name owner. As we will demonstrate in this paper, the mere existence of a typo may not be a big problem in and of itself, but when combined with traffic, some names can be problematic and costly for brand owners.

Quality of Typo Domains

The other main driver of revenue that typosquatters consider when deciding which domains to target and register is the value of one misspelling in relation to another. Two factors that affect which domains will be targeted include the length of the name and its monthly traffic. The quality of the typo domain depends upon the specific type of spelling mistake it exploits and the proximity of commonly entered or switched letters on a keyboard.

A brand owner’s level of exposure to typosquatting is directly related to site traffic and name prominence. The more traffic and prominence the target name has, the more likely it is that typosquatting will be extensive and harmful. In other words, those domains related to brands and products that are top of mind for Internet users stand the greatest risk of being infringed. However, brand owners can take precautionary measures to prevent their sites from being exploited. Thoughtful consideration of traffic, the particular appeal that a domain name has among Internet users and the prevalence of certain typing mistakes can help to effectively combat typosquatting in both proactive and reactive ways. The research in this paper aims to further explore these important factors that must be considered.

< previous page | next page >