Google may be earning an alleged $500 million a year via companies and individuals who register deceptive website addresses.
The claim centers on a controversial scheme known as “typosquatting“, the practice of registering a misspelled variant of a popular web domain. For example, a typosquatter might register “evolvefuels.com” in the hope of getting visits from people who meant to type “evolvefuel.com”.
If that mistake is made frequently enough, the owner of evolvefuels.com can profit by placing ads on their page. They could, in particular, use Google’s advertising network which automatically assigns ads to a page based on its content, or using keywords provided by the page’s owner.
In that case, Google could get a cut too, and Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman at Harvard University have now estimated how much money this could bring in for Google.
Spelling slips
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.
If the top 100,000 websites suffer the same typosquatting rate as the sites Moore and Edelman studied, up to 68 million people a day could visit a typo site, they say. They estimate that almost 60 per cent of typo sites could have adverts supplied by Google.
If the company earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, they conclude.
Google’s total 2009 revenues were $23 billion, 97 per cent of which came from advertising.
Removing ads
A Google spokesperson pointed out that the company will remove ads from typo domains if the owner of a site with a trademarked name makes a complaint, but declined to discuss the research in more detail.
Typo domains confuse consumers and can generate unnecessary costs for the owners of the targeted web domain, say Moore and Edelman. Companies can feel compelled to advertise on typo domains targeting their own websites because they fear they might lose business to competitors if they do not.
Edelman has criticized Google’s adverts appearing on typo domains in the past. He is currently co-counsel on a lawsuit from a firm seeking damages from Google after its adverts appeared on a typo domain targeting the claimant’s website. He says that his involvement in the suit did not influence the results of his research.
Court action
“I’m not doing it for the money,” Edelman says of the court action. “I’m doing it because it’s important.”
Moore and Edelman say their analysis found that some website owners operate thousands of different typo domains. They claim that this means Google and other ad networks would also be able to identify operators of such sites.
A paper on More and Edelman’s findings was presented last month at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference in Tenerife, Spain. An online appendix provides more information about the analysis.
Adobe’s Flash technology has been taking a beating lately. Apple still won’t support it on its upcoming iPad or its iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it buggy and crash-prone and dismisses Adobe as being lazy. Adobe is trying to fight the negative vibes emanating from Cupertino and elsewhere. It has already pointed out that it will be easy to convert Flash apps into iPad apps, and now CTO Kevin Lynch is weighing in to defend Flash.
A: “There are some key business model differences in the NY Times and Facebook. People are already used to paying for the newspaper and have been ever since there have been publications. Facebook on the other hand will suffer a huge loss in its userbase. What facebook will likely do is offer a free membership to those that don’t mind more ads in their space and a limited number of features. Whereas a paying user will get ad free space along with a much more extended feature set. Giving the user a reason to pay is what the name of this game will be. This is IF they decide to get users to pay for service. What they should do is figure out how to offer up more advertising like the google empire! What if google charged everyone to use their search engine? Not gonna happen. Why? Because everyone is ok with how they are being advertised to and google makes a fortune on their ads from those businesses willing to pay the fee. What facebook should do is create new and innovative features for the user. Grow their userbase in such a way that advertisers will be willing to pay much more than they do now for advertising because they will be reaching a much larger and broader audience.“
