Google Makes $500M a Year On Typos 98
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on an analysis by Harvard researchers that suggests Google rakes in half a billion dollars annually from advertising that appears on typosquatting domains. They estimate that 60 per cent of typosquatting pages use Google ads, but the advertising giant declined to discuss whether it should be working with such pages."
Something I wondered about Google (Score:2, Interesting)
When you advertise with Google, they take an upfront fee. They want at least $50. Now they have the cash. They don't pay the website that's hosting the ads unless someone clicks on the ad AND check isn't written until the hoster's account hits $100. In the meantime, Google has the cash paid by the advertiser.
If any thing, the typo domain squatters are costing Google money or probably more accurate, making them not as profitable since they are planning to pay out the advertising share -eventually - but the money isn't in their bank. If that made any sense.
What about the registrar? (Score:4, Interesting)
The guy who did the "study" is a douche.
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. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.
They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.
Why didn't he publish the registrars that provide typo domains? There isn't any question that they profit directly from those typosquaters.