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Google Makes $500M a Year On Typos
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."
Someone on Google saw some new Internet service and said "I wish I had $0.01 for each typo the teens make."
Someone else said "You know, that's a really, really good idea. Let's do it."
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Slashdot got a nickel for every typo...
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I'm sure that Google requires as a condition of their AdSense program, your site contains at least some content. They manually review sites before you get accepted into the AdSense program.
Unless of course you use their Domain Parking option.
They won't maek a penny out of me!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
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.
Once or twice in my life I have landed at a domain squatter's site due to a typo. Hundreds or thousands of times I have landed there due to links to sites that used to be something but are now run by the squatters.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
No logical leaps here:
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.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Google AdSense for Domains has more impressions than most people would believe.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Typosquatting is evil but, $500 million per year is delicious. How can we increase revenues? Ooh, let's run our own global DNS system do our own typo squatting and cut out the middle man!
Genious! Eric, peel me a grape.
As long as it is not leading the user to some fishy site, I think it is perfectly legit to work with these kind of sites especially when it involves $500 mil
I hope they're not suggesting it's unethical of Google to work with these typo-squatters, because it simply isn't. Now, if the typo-squatters were trying to trick people into thinking they'd reached where they were attempting to get, that would be unethical.
It's becoming a moot point, anyway... Most people I know type the web address into the Google search box, then click on the link that appears.
Google makes money on ads. Typosquatting pages use ads (mostly Google ads). I can sense the evil.
Considering Google's ad network is the least obtrusive, not likely to try to infect your computer, doesn't prevent you from hitting the "back" button, etc etc.
Having THEM make money on that type of fraud probably does less damage than Doubleclick, or whomever else would be doing it.
As long as the domains are fully paid for and not typosquatting domain-tasting operations I have no problem with it.
"Well if google does it, it's OK."
Namespace is a natural resource. A renewable one?
All rites reversed 2010
Every thirteen year old with a cell phone will be a millionaire by year's end...
Bart's Law #2:
Any time a person or entity makes a "mistake" that puts extra money (or power) in their pocket,
expect them to make that "mistake" again and again and again. That's why refineries have fires now and then,
because a fire allows them to scream "unexpected shortage" so they can gouge us on the price of gas.
http://www.bartcop.com/bartslaw.htm
-How to be a good journalist: "Conditional news, are not news".
Sigh, guess someone forgot about that one.
Headline should read: Single Keystroke Can Cut Google's Profits By $500m a Year
Legit squatting sites are no different than a billboard you see after you make a wrong turn while driving.
Like others have said, as long as they aren't a phishing site or trying to trick you into believing you are where you are not, then it sounds like there is no foul.
One thing I've never seen discussed is how typosquaters can get your ssh passwords. I almost fell for one. Like many slashdotters I have some personal servers on adsl lines (moving IPs) and thus use the services of a dynamic DNS. I wanted to connect to user@myhomepc.dnsalias.com, one of the most common dynalic DNS, but mistyped the domain name (don't remember how exactly). I was nonetheless prompted for a password, which I stopped halfway, remembering that I had setup a public key and thus did not have to type one. It's easy to recompile ssh to log all passwords attempted. Hook it on a catchall for all subdomains and you can start gathering accesses...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Surely it's not Google's fault that some people misspell. But our study shos that typosquatters register more domains targeting companies in sectors with high PPC prices. That tells us that PPC funding is *causing* and *exacerbating* typosquatting. Without PPC payments, there would be fewer typosquatting registrations -- much less reason for squatters to register these domains. Google's payments put the system in motion; squatters register domains exactly in anticipation of getting paid by Google. Google knows where it's showing ads. (Example: Google shows Expedia ads if you misspell Expedia, but Travelocity ads if you misspell Travelocity!) So it's natural to look to Google for resolution of these problems.
Incidentally, the federal ACPA statute is squarely on point: Your elected congressmen chose to prohibit not just "register[ing]" domains but also "us[ing]" domains. Showing ads on domains is surely a kind of "use."
So is Google "just offering an ad service"? No! Google analyzes a user's request, assess what domain the user was trying to reach, and selects ads accordingly. Google bills advertisers for each click and passes payment on to the typosquatters. These are proper reasons for the concerned public to demand more of Google.
At least they're not letting all those typos go to waste!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
I spend about $5,000 per day on adwords for my legitimate business. fair enough. we couldnt live without it and it makes money for us.
HOWEVER
probably about 1/3 of that is blatantly stolen by google. how?
their copy says that they display our ads on RELEVANT sites. it says "relevant."
nevertheless, at leat 1/3 of our ads are shown on sites that couldn't by the wildest definition of the term 'relevant' be considered in any way shape or form to be 'relevant.' i mean, we do,err, engineering-like stuff and our ads go on turkish-language hip-hop sites.
adwords' functionality for us to explicitly flag domains that we don't want is a scam since they artificially limit you to some 1000 domains or whatever it is. we compiled a list of 20,000 blatantly inappropriate domains in the first few months.
so, i'm under no illusions - yes, google does help us, but they are also ruthless bastards. if only we were big enough to sue them, we would, as their use of the word 'relevant' there is nothing short of outright fraud.
I'm not sure if you saw the portion of our article that develops the estimate and presents the methodology for the estimate. If not, that might be of interest.
As you say, it's hard to make a precise estimate. There are important pieces of data uniquely within Google's custody, and Google isn't talking. But in these circumstances, I do feel it's appropriate to make a good-faith estimate. If you think our numbers are in error, feel free to identify which specific numbers you think are off, in which direction, and for what reason. But realize that for every number you think is too high, there is likely to be another that might be too low. (We discuss some of these complications in the page linked above.) I don't think it's clear from first principles that our estimate is biased in one way or the other.
If Googles refuses its advertising services to those domain typo ad park owners, it will only affect Googls's bottom line. The site owners will get some other ad service to serve up ads, and they will keep making money. The only way something like that will work is is every major online advertising service agrees not to serve ads to blacklisted ad sites (blad sites). If the typo squatters had to put in more effort to secure ads from multiple sources, it would make the sites less profitable.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Anybody do the math here? $500m is their GROSS income from these domains when their NET annual profit is more than 1000 time bigger. They're not making any important profit here. That they allow this is probably just a volume-mitigated oversight. If I sell a Widget that breaks for a $1 profit and a company that makes a better, more durable version sells 1 billion of them for $2 more and pays $1.50 more, for them, and makes $100 Billion dollars, I'm pretty sure I'm still the evil one.
Can I be a Luddite too?
You may wish to use your browsers help function to research how to use bookmarks, they are a wonderful new invention.
Our own data, at SiteTruth, indicates that about 34% of Google Content Network advertisers, by domain name, are "bottom feeder" sites which we can't associate with a real-world business. This is disappointing, but not surprising. When you see a Google ad, it's not usually from a Fortune 1000 company, after all.
Our data comes from our AdRater plug-in, which rates the advertiser behind each Google ad as it appears on the user's web page. If someone goes to an ad-heavy typosquatting site, we'll see the domains advertised there. (We don't see the typosquatting domain, though; we don't monitor what pages the user views, just the ad domains. We're interested in advertiser behavior, not use behavior.) We collect the domain names of the advertisers, so we have a sizable fraction of Google's customer list, and this is hard data. We're not extrapolating.
(Collecting Google's customer list is a "long tail" kind of thing. The first 25,000 Google advertisers were seen in the first two months; the next 25,000 showed up over about four months. We'll never see them all, but we've probably seen most of them by now. Google probably has somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 active advertisers, by domain name.)
The numbers indicate that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes from those "bottom feeders". That's why Google can't be very tough on "web spam". They have Matt Cutts claiming that Google tries to stop web spam, but, realistically, they don't try very hard. They can't. It's essential to their business model.
Search Google for "craigslist auto posting tool". Not only are there paid ads for software to put ads on Craiglist using phony accounts, some of them use Google Checkout, so Google gets a cut of what's basically a fraud scheme. ("Automatic CAPTCHA bypass available with integrated Image-to-Text support!") Google's advertiser validation standards are very low.
In this case the mistakes are typos, and the profit goes to Google (and others), but the idea isn't all that novel.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
... states make millions of dollars each year on people who can't do math, i.e., lotteries. Not sure what the point of this article is; are we supposed to hate Google for making money off dumb people?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I agree, and make the additional point that typosquatters exploiting adsense is actually a huge improvement on how things used to be!
For those with short memories, in the late 1990s when the Internet really got going with the general public but before adsense, the only way typosquatters could make money was by offering ads to porn sites or serving up malware (or both). Getting a single letter wrong in a URL usually meant getting a face full of porn (and not good porn either) or long hours reinstalling your OS. As soon as adsense came along the scammers realised they could make more money with legit ads and quit with the porn.
Don't get me wrong, the scammers still suck. They just suck less they they used to.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.