DomainTools Blog

We have a brand new tool! We just released “Registrant View” on Typo domains. Our current view on the typo tool only showed what typos existed, our new view now shows who owns them rather then having to click through to view the owner’s name and then separately track the results in excel. It literally takes hours to perform that step manually. Our users have been asking for more transparency and easier access to typo reports which don’t require so much manual work.

Here is a screenshot of the tool. You can click on the image below and you will be taken to the search that generated this image.

Chameleon typo squatters are nothing new, but I have never blogged about them so I thought I would share with people on what they are and how to spot them. If you look up a domain name’s whois record the domain appears to be owned by the legitimate owner however that is never the case with a chameleon. These domains hide in plain sight and use victim’s contact information instead of their own. They can be spotted a few ways. One, the email may be the only thing wrong in the record. Two, the administrative email may be correct but the domain is at a registrar that the owner never uses. I was looking up GoogleWishes.com the other day and I spotted a Chameleon.

Detection is often easier if the victim keeps their domains at one registrar then it is actually very easy to spot them.

Here is a good example of a chameleon:

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.

I think I have got about 6 calls in the last day from large portfolio owners. They want to know how to clean their portfolios. This is a hard question to answer because there is no good way to clean house. If you think you own a TM domain and don’t want the liability of owning it even if you delete it you can be sued. Domain Tasters sometimes own a domain for less then 5 days and get lawsuits months after they owned the domain. So if you have a portfolio and owned the domain for 2 years and delete it you are not sitting in the clear. Registering the domain is enough is to cause someone to sue you. So if deleting the domain doesn’t resolve all the conflicts how does a portfolio owner get clean. Let’s say you own 100,000 domains. You are likely to have at least 0.5% of the domains that can conflict with someone else. There will always be conflicts. The best advise is don’t sell off your trademark domains, delete them. The penny pitchers inside the portfolio companies really want to do this but it can really bite a portfolio holder in the end. When you are trafficking in TM domains and may bite the company in the end just as hard has holding them long term.

Mitigating liability is something that all portfolio owners should be doing. When one of the domains in that 0.5% percent hits you with lawsuit they can use your registration history, deleted domains, sold domains, and your current 0.5% of domains to paint a picture that you systematically target Trademark holders. If you park directly with Yahoo they have a tool that allows people to run domains against their trademark system. There can be false positives but at least it flags some of the domains and a human can walk through those instead of the whole portfolio.

Some portfolio owners are addicted to the cash of the TM domains. They transfer the domains to off shore sister companies. What a mistake, smart lawyers are not fooled by shell companies. If a portfolio holder always transfers to the same company the lawyer knows there is a good link between the two companies and can subpoena evidence to prove the theory. So don’t trick yourself to think you are clean if you divide your portfolio into two holding companies (Good Guys, Inc and Bad Guys, Inc.). They share money, they share assets, then the corporate veil can be pierced.

Offshore? There is no offshore. This is a myth. For Taxes, Yes. For lawsuits, No. Virgina is where the registry for DotCom is and a lawsuit in that federal court can get all assets both Good and Bad. So if you value your DotComs and don’t want to loose them you have to be completely clean and not hold bad liabilities.

When you delete a domain it can cause untold havoc. You are now putting a TM domain into someone’s Domain Tasting queue. It also makes the domain available to anyone to register. A newbie is going to pick up the domain and get struck by the lightning that you feared. In the ideal situation if you think you have a possible TM domain that you want to delete it would be nice to have a 501c3 charity like Mr. Peppler started called CarryOn.com that would hold possible TM domains. CarryOn.com doesn’t hold TM domains just adult domains. But a new charity could hold TM domains. The goal of the charity would be to direct domains to the rightful owner and try to give those domains back to the owners. The charity would not monetize the domains while they hold them. It would be great if Verisign was willing to be a major donor because a majority of the money the charity would operate would be for registrations paid directly to Verisign.

I would recommend any portfolio owner that has over 20,000 domains to get an outside audit on domains that they own every 6 months. If you get caught in a lawsuit that audit trail would be helpful to show good faith. When you judge and evaluate your own domains there is no outside balance and perspective.

With all the publicity on cybersquating and Microsoft trademarks. One would think only a moron would register a trademark of Microsoft. I think I found the biggest moron alive. He went out and registered every spelling error he could find of Microsoft. Talk about wanting to be hit by lightning. Kerry can I introduce you to Aaron Kornblum.

I think there is an endless supply of want-a-be domainers that just turn out to be Cybersquatters. My best advise to a new domainers is stay away from other people’s trademarks. If you have heard of a company or a product the best advice is to NOT register it. Find generic domains. Register local domains. I live in Seattle, so SeattleHousing.com or SeattleMenus.com are good domains to register. A lot of the good generic domains are taken but there are still a lot out there. Find them.

A new startup called CitizenHawk hunts for Typos of Domain Names. However, when we compare their paid results with our Domain Typo Generator tool, we find our results are much better.

CitizenHawk sent out a press release that they found 2,318 typos on Wichita. However, they never released the list of typos that made up the list. I doubt there are 2,318 typos, so I would love to audit their results. This is an open challenge to CitizenHawk to publish your typo list on the banks cited in their press release and let us audit the results.

Banks and the number of typos mentioned:

• Capital One - 2,519 domains
• Wichita - 2,318 domains
• Bank of America - 1,595 domains
• Wells Fargo - 1,557 domains
• Citibank - 1,082 domains
• Sun Trust - 600 domains
• Commerce Bank - 475 domains
• Washington Mutual - 465 domains
• Bank of the West - 118 domains
• HS BC Direct - 83 domains

DomainTools offers a Domain Typo tool that is currently being offered for free during its beta period. We encourage feedback on our tool and how it can be improved. Our goal is to have the best typo tool in the world.

Universal Tube the manufacturer of tubes sued Google because of the amount of traffic they had coming to their site. They said these “nuisance Internet visitors” have caused their server to crash many times, which lead them to sue Google. The UTube company could not figure out why there was so much traffic but they finally figured it out. People heard about YouTube and so they went to a computer and typed in “U Tube”.

To a Domainer this is Internet Gold. To a pipe company this is “nuisance Internet Visitors”, but wait. They had someone from SearchFeed.com contact them and offer them a way to make money off of the traffic. Turns out they could make a lot of money off the traffic by selling advertising for Ringtones and other Pay-Per-Click advertising at the top of the page.

Estimates by Compete.com say 1 Million people a month visit the UTube.com site. However we have calculated that the visitors are actually much higher. Which could be as high as 6 Million visitors because Compete only measures US traffic.

We estimate that UTube is making $8,000 a day on the traffic or $2,920,000 a year. The domain is now easily worth 10 years revenue which comes out to a cool $29 Million if they wanted to sell. Else they can sit back and collect the free money from the YouTube monster typo.

Owning a domain is like buying a lottery ticket, you never know who your neighbor will be or how popular. A good example is Disney Internet Group. They own DIG.com, but someone else registered DIGG.com. Now Disney enjoys free traffic.

The Editor Ron Jackson of DNJournal had an interesting point,

“As many have been predicting for months now, the typosquatting issue has moved to center stage in the domain business. Typosquatting is the practice of registering domain names that are misspellings of popular brand names. Those names are then used to generate pay per click revenue from web surfers who accidentally mistype a domain name and end up on an advertising page owned by the typosquatter. Practitioners of this black art have made a lot of money over the years, but in 2007 holding infringing names may well earn you an expensive day in court rather than a fat PPC check.”

But my question to Ron is, how will the little guy defend themselves against the squatters? Verizon can hire expensive lawyers and it may cost squatters that pick on those domains. But most companies will not fight back. Most will just sit there and passively take it. They may not even be aware it is even happening to themselves. They don’t have time to pick the flees off their back. Squatting on non TM domains is a problem that will not go away quickly. As an example of this point, even DN Journal has fleas on its back.

Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand how to manage their own domain names. They have chosen to delete MSN Hotmail.com. They could have simply renewed the domain for $10 and that would have been the end of the story. Most large companies have several misspellings of their domain names or variations on it, but this is a generic combination of two words MSN + Hotmail. They even brand it as such on their login page - see the screenshot above. Large companies should always renew these type of domain names because they get a lot of traffic and they would not want other people to own them. Plus, they have branded it and driven all this traffic to it. Hotmail customers will be very confused next week when they see ads for other web email companies instead of a login page. Compete.com says that the domain gets 29,854 U.S. visitors per month, but we are sure that the number of visitors is far higher (compete’s numbers tend to be a bit low). Either way, this name should have been renewed.

The domain is currently in pending-delete status, so we know it will delete for sure. There is no way to get the domain back out of this status - the registry has a 30 day redemption status but Microsoft slept right through it. Whomever manages Microsoft’s domains should get a swift kick in the bum from top management. Once it does drop, many people will back order it.  The highest bidder will win it, and they will confuse Microsoft customers. Microsoft is appearently clueless, so they will not even bid, but eventual they will find out that someone else owns their domain name and then they will spend a few thousand dollars to recover it. All this because someone at Microsoft thought they didn’t need it.  After all, they own MSN.com and Hotmail.com, so why would they need MSNHotmail.com.

We have had a Domain Typo Generator tool inside our R&D lab for a while, however we never released it. Now that we will be publishing an open “Trademark Blacklist“, we feel it is safe to release the tool. We didn’t want to empower domain squatters by releasing the tool, but then again if we didn’t release it then Trademark Attorneys would not be able to find domain squatters. A squatter already knows how to come up with typos, so this tool is meant to level the playing field. Attorneys have less tools than you would think and so we thought it would be appropriate to launch after our announcement of the blacklist. The Tool is only for Gold Members, but we have made a special link for Blog readers to give them free access to the tool for a limited period of time.

http://www.domaintools.com/domain-typo/?free=yes

The tool has a lot of options like Qwerty Typos, Letter Swaps, Sticky Keys, and Look-a-like domains.  It has a total of 13 types of typos, and we plan to release more in the future. Inside the application we have a DNS view, which allows a user to group the Typos by users of the domains. It is easy to spot parking companies and other people that have registered large batches of domain names.

We want feedback on the tool, and we are planning a dashboard to manage groups of search results. Once a search has been done, a user will be able to select the domains they want to follow up with and leave notes on the dashboard. Each search results in a few hundred typos, so it will be important to be able to manage them.