Researchers at Harvard University have discovered that Google may be making around half a billion dollars per year via typosquatting, says a NewScientist report.”Moore and 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,” says the report. “They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.”The report says researchers analysed revenue sources from 285,000 of the 900,000 typo domains found by Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman, the Harvard researchers, and found around 80 per cent were supported by pay-per-click ads, and Google ads were by far the most prevalent.”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.”Google says they remove advertising from typosquatted domain names only if the original trademark holder files a complaint.To read this NewScientist report in full, see:
www.newscientist.com/article/dn18542-typos-may-earn-google-500m-a-year.html
Typosquatting May Earn Google $500 million per year
Researchers at Harvard University have discovered that Google may be making around half a billion dollars per year via typosquatting, says a NewScientist report.