Typosquatting: An Invesstment in Stoopidity
In recent weeks, both Google and Yahoo have come under public scrutiny for profiting from a practice known as typosquatting. A clever way for publishers and advertisers to capitalize on spelling-impaired web users, typosquatting is the parking of a domain name spelled a few characters differently than a major branded site, as in “Goggle.com”.
Once considered amateurish and ineffective, typosquatting has refined its tactics, enticed the big name ad networks, and become a lucrative stream of emarketing in its own right. Yet as the practice grows in prominence, it raises more and more concerns over trademark infringement and the intentional misleading of web users.
According to recent estimates, about 15 percent of all web traffic originates from users typing directly in to the URL box. As there is obviously no such thing as a spell check for URLs (to date), a good deal of hastily or ignorantly typed addresses are inaccurate. Instead of returning to a dead-end “404 File Not Found” page, these sites started to get bought out and filled with ads relevant to the product or service of the site being emulated.
It didn’t take long for the major ad networks like Google to get in on the profits and start selling inventory to countless typosquatting sites. Operators soon developed programs to devise thousands of misspellings for a given site, register them as domains, and park them on a trial basis to find which provided the most erroneous landings.
Typosquatters have since thought of just about everything. Commas next to periods, phonetic misspellings, abandoned brand names or campaigns, and interchanged address suffixes (such as .com for .org) are all effective strategies.
With the sophistication of typosquatting inevitably came the backlash of the major brands, who justifiably claim the sites make a profit off their names and detract from traffic to their own sites. While they’ve tried a number of methods to combat the practice, such as filing lawsuits and buying out misspelled domains of their own, they have yet to formally define typosquatting as a legal infringement. There is no doubt that typosquatting negatively affects the sites which it parrots to some extent, but determining exactly what constitutes trademark infringement in a web URL is a very subjective matter.
A more legally debatable question at this time is whether or not the sites do more help than they cause harm to the users who find them. In most cases, users will quickly realize their mistake and not think they are actually on the page they intended to visit. And frequently, they are led to sites which can help them find what they need, if not the actual site they attempted to type in.
Yet fundamentally, typosquatting intends to mislead users by utilizing an advance understanding of what they are looking for. On top of that, they frequently transport surfers to sites with pornographic, gambling-related, or otherwise questionable content, an interaction which can incidentally detract from their identification with the brand in question.
Regardless, typosquatting has gained the most valuable currency that exists on the Internet: the support of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In addition to supplying ad inventory for these sites, the giants have attempted to extend the reach of their search engines by claiming misspelled sites for themselves. Internet Explorer users, for example, are by default greeted with an MSN search box any time they stumble onto a site that is not registered to anyone.
As long as idiocy rages on the Internet, and as long as major companies try to profit from it, typosquatting will continue to be a viable marketing avenue in the online space.
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