Les Jones

Word of the Day > Word of the Day - Typosquatter

Typosquatter - a person who registers a mis-spelled version of a domain name.

Typed too fast? Google profits from your typo:

The practice has sparked a speculative scramble to register unused names and test their ad potential. Because purchasers can change their minds within five days and avoid paying the $6 registration fee for the name, many investors enter the names in Google's ad program for a quick test and quickly drop those that don't yield enough clicks to cover the domain registration fee.

Of the 30 million dot-com names registered worldwide last month, more than 90 percent were dropped, according to domain name registrar GoDaddy.com. As a whole, the Internet has 54 million active .com and .net addresses, according to VeriSign.

Jackson said he has bought 6,600 domains and uses several ad services to earn revenue on them. "I know quite a few guys making over a million dollars a year from advertising on their domains," he said. "It's like a 24-hour money-printing machine."

I know someone in Knoxville who typosquats. He started out guessing at mis-spelled domains. Then he got scientific about it and had someone with access to a well-used DNS lookup table to collect failed domain lookups. He buys popular mis-spellings, singular/plural orphans, and correctly-spelled domains that don't exist but that people are attempting to access.

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