DomainTools Blog

A very impressive analysis was preformed by McAfee on typo domains. They sliced and diced the numbers and revealed a lot about how the typo universe works right now. In an effort to further quantify and understand this phenomenon, McAfee studied 1.9 million typographical variations of 2,771 of the most popular and well known Web sites. Of these, they found 127,381 suspected typo-squatters. Which means that the typo sites out number the real sites by 45 to 1.

The domain world is anything but static; rules change, traffic changes, prices change, and domains change hands. The conclusion of the report is easy to predict; monetization firms win, search engines win, registrars & registries win, and the typo guys win. The losers are the famous and not so brands along with their customers.

Among McAfee’s key findings are the following:

• Typo-squatting is vast and common, affecting every segment of the Web. 7.2% of the possible typographical errors we studied were actively squatting. In other words, a typical consumer who misspells a popular Web site URL has a 1 in 14 chance of landing at a likely typo-squatter site.
• The five most highly squatted categories are game sites (14.0%), airlines (11.4%), main stream media company sites (10.8%), adult sites (10.2%) and technology and Web 2.0 related sites (9.6%).
• Children’s sites are highly targeted by typo squatters. The average for the category is 8.4% and 24 of the top most squatted sites are children’s properties for kids 12 and under. Add in sites like MySpace and Miniclip and more than 60 of the top most squatted sites are properties that appeal to the 18 and under demographic.
• Squatters follow consumer crowds. Popular, consumer-focused Web sites typically attract more squatters than business to business sites or niche content sites.
• The incidence of pornographic content on non-adult typo-squatted sites is just 2.4%, suggesting improvement since previous studies by other researchers.
• Automated ad syndication services like Google’s AdSense enable a significant minority of typo-squatter sites to generate revenue. Google-enabled advertising shows up on 19.3% of all suspected typo-squatter sites in this study. Yahoo-enabled advertising shows up on 4.4% of all suspected typo-squatter sites.
• The increasing use of automation to buy and sell vast numbers of domains, combined with a 5-day free trial (known as “tasting”) for new registrations to top level domains like dot-com appear to be two significant factors in the rapid growth of typo-squatting.
• At 3.4%, sites popular outside the U.S. are less than half as likely to be typo-squatted as overall sites.
• The five non-U.S. countries most likely to have popular sites squatted are the United Kingdom (7.7%), Portugal (6.5%), Spain (5.9%), France (5.4%), and Italy (4.1%).
• The five non-U.S. countries least likely to have popular sites squatted are the Netherlands (1.5%), Israel (1.1%), Denmark (1.0%), Brazil (0.9%) and Finland (0.1%).
• The top four parking companies, ranked by the percentage of squatters parked by them, are Oversee.net/Domainsponsor (31.4%), Hitfarm (11.3%), Sedo (2.5%) and GoDaddy (2.3%). Together, the top four park 47.5% of the squatters we discovered.

The proliferation of typo domains and the difficulty inherent in cross-jurisdictional disputes and the high cost of arbitration and litigation make it difficult at best for mark holders to dispute each and every case of squatting.

An interesting note about Willful Blindness, “Interestingly, a WIPO decision from 2006 holds that domains speculators who use automated registration software without checking to see if the site infringes on another’s marks could represent bad faith “willful blindness”. These kinds of decisions could lead to changes in the domaining process.”

McAfee concluded that 1 in 14 times a consumer mistypes a popular domain they find one of these typo sites. However I would argue that number is much higher. The most common typos are the ones that get typed in the most, so therefore it is more likely to be 99% of time that they will land on a typo cybersquater. Try mistyping Google.com and you will see it is hard not to run into a typo-domain.