Typosquatting

Strategic Implications

What does this mean for brand owners in terms of their overall domain strategy? Typosquatting is a serious issue that needs attention if brand owners are to fully leverage the domain name space and be where their consumers attempt to find them. Implementing a logical and well-developed strategy is an essential key to success. Owning every conceivable typo of a domain name is both unfeasible and unwise since most are not valuable or useful.

In order to most effectively guard against typosquatting, brands must identify the typo variations of their domains with the highest value (which are therefore the most likely to be cybersquatted) and then work to register and acquire those domains. By taking a domain name and comparing it to our findings about the most common typing errors, owners can logically determine the weakest points in their names as well as the ones most likely to be typosquatted. With a clear idea of which names are most important in terms of traffic and strategic value to the brand, owners can make the most of their portfolios while avoiding costly enforcement of names that are not causing as much harm. Strategic registrations, drop-catches, and enforcement activities can drastically reduce the damage caused by typosquatting.

In addition to the most common typing mistakes shown in Figure 2, brand owners should also consider the different available TLDs. Figure 5 shows the TLD breakdown across our data set, which included dot-COM, dot-NET, dot-ORG, dot-BIZ, dot-INFO, and dot-US:

Figure 5: Most Common TLD Registrations Within the Data Set [+]

Because users occasionally enter a different TLD, registering additional TLDs can help all brands, particularly those registering outside of dot-COM. For example, wikipedia.org has also strategically registered wikipedia.com. Overall, TLDs remain an important consideration when building a domain name portfolio strategy. Interestingly, the infringers who monetize traffic are known to favor dot-COM. We think brand owners who tend to use dot-COM should be similarly focused on this extension in their domain portfolio.

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