Nice report, Ben, as usual.

It leads me to ask a question of you. Presumably typosquatters don’t just register names for fun, but for money. Why don’t brands register their own typos and profit from them?

You’d think they’d be keenly registering every typo out there and collectively being the 10th most popular site on the Internet.

There seems to be some stubborn “principle” that they are standing on, that says something like: “We shouldn’t have to register typos of our own name, even though we would profit handsomely.  Therefore we will bite off our nose to spite our face.”

Every “start your own business” guide on the web suggests registering your name in multiple TLDs as well as obvious typos. This advice is not framed as a protection mechanism, but rather as a way to capture valuable traffic. The more doors that your customers can walk through, the easier you can make it for them, the better

Law are one thing, business reality is another.  I certainly don’t condone typosquatting, but a prudent business person will adapt to the environment as necessary.

It seems that brands (large brands, smaller ones seems to “get it”) just want the web to be “their way” or “no way.”  Brands could easily capture all that traffic, and the associated profits. They would just need to hire an ex-typosquatter or two to show them how, just as they hired ex-hackers to show them how to secure their Internet operations.

To me, the mystery is not that there is typosquatting, but rather why brands aren’t profiting from the popularity of their own brands.

Antony

Nice report Ben and Tyler.  This is a fairly damning article, and it’ll be interesting to see how Google responds. 

I never had any solid estimates of how big the business was, but I had my guesses—and your numbers, while larger, aren’t that far off from my guesses based on traffic I see.

Ben,

If I’m reading this right, it means that brands are leaving $497 M on the table every years by not registering their own typos.

Antony

Curious: Would typosquatting be considered a form of social engineering, for the purposes of user training in any given business IT policy program? It requires a user’s ignorance and capitalizes on said mistakes for the benefit of the cybersquatter. Taking into consideration the Wikipedia article on typosquatting, is cybersquatting the higher-level problem? And in retrospect, maybe cybersquatting is a form of social engineering? Overall, how might a business best model/write policy/educate it’s employees about said dangers?

This is a great article Benjamin. Are you at Harvard Business School right now? Would love to talk to you about some of these issues face-to-face. I am at the Harvard Business School OPM by the way until this Friday. Actually had a chat with Deepak about some underlying issues. I am sure you know him.

Great work!

Regards,

Constantine Roussos
.music

Thanks for the time and effort creating this comprehensive look at something going on for many years, Ben.

Big old Google sure doesn’t need me defending them, but here’s a philosophical question. Google did an undeniable good by creating a new source of income for online publishers. AdSense probably keeps thousands of small publishers afloat. But to err is human, and people will always make mistakes typing in domains, at least until the utopia of true semantic search arrives.

So smart people learn the game the system, as smart people game all systems. That makes typosquatting the lesser evil to a greater good. And Google didn’t design the overall system - actually no one did, although ICANN tries to manage it now.

Antony, totally agree the big brands were asleep at the switch but isn’t it too late, with .com being first come, first served? Or are you saying they could/should wrest control of their typo domains away from squatters?

The argument that trademark holders should try and defensively register every possible variation of their marks as domains, across all TLDs, is a common one. But it is really like saying that ok to rob someone’s house because they left the window unlocked.  There really is no way to register all typo variations across all TLDs.  More importantly, these typos are profitable for typosquatters because they typically own thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of typos across lots of brands.

So trademark owners are not ‘leaving money on the table.’  And the laws should continue to focus on making unlawful behavior unlawful, and not shift the burden on legitimate businesses to protect themselves or suffer the consequence.