Google typosquat cash pegged at $497m per year Google may earn as much as $497m a year from typosquatters, according to a study from Harvard professor and noted Mountain View critic Ben Edelman. In a study first presented late last month at the Financial Security and Data Cryptography conference in Tenerife, Spain, Edelman and fellow Harvard researcher Tyler Moore estimate …
"...even though they probably stole the money they are paying with..."
Yes, but the store sells them crowbars, knives, guns/ammunition etc, and then takes a percentage of the money that the dodgy-looking types make from using these 'tools'.
Analogies can be fun to play with.
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Its not the cash thats significant but the fact that Google is breaking not only the law but its own terms of service by providing ads for typosquatters, but also that it is providing revenue to typosquatters, thus encouraging these idiots.
I sincerely hope that the profs provided the details of the typosquatter sites they found to google to see whether google actually removed their ads from these sites or whether that particular clause of its sevrice policy was just its usual "placate the masses" bollocks...
That number seems too high. Partner site clicks are very cheap to advertise on, they normally cost me about 4p-5p per click. So they are assuming that every single person that misspells a domain clicks on an advert while they are there - which seems to be bad logic.
I would cut their estimated income number by a factor of 5-20 since most people will immediatey continue to search for their intended target site rather than hang around on the obviously wrong site looking at the adverts.
Hey @ ratfox. The significance is not the revenue but the behaviour.
As with the recent court case in France, there is rumblings of unhapiness that Google makes revenue through advertising where people's TM's can be purchased through adsense by said TM's competitor to point to their own product.
Looking for splatogun (TM) and get pushed to splashgun(TM) with an Adsense redirect.
This is just another method of redirect. Google wins all ways however in terms of revenue.
These are pay-per-click ads, right? Google etc get paid if people click through them?
So if I try to go to (eg) www.microsoft.com and i misspell it as www.microsof.com and lets say that's a page full of ads, am I really going to think "Oh, this isn't microsoft, but that looks like an interesting offer on holidays ..." and click through?
Or am i going to just type the url in properly ...?
It's about time that domain registrars change the rules so that domains can't be registered for the sole purpose of making cash from click-through ads.
While I don't want to get into the topic of exactly how the rules should be changed I do think that the registrars need to play their part in making the internet a more enjoyable experience. Eliminating typo-squatters would be a welcome action.
I've watched plenty of users who, having mistyped a domain name, then click through an advert that seems to point to what they are actually after. If your misspelt domain is even slightly clever about what adverts it carries, clickthroughs will be a lot higher than a tech audience (who immediately recognise they have misspelt) would realise.
I used to think that search engines would be the death of the essentially parasitic advertising industry, because it would mean there would be a direct link between creators - whether of physical or intellectual - goods and the purchasers. Thus the customer would pay less and the creator would get paid more without the parasitic middleman.
But look what's happened: the damn advertisers are getting more money than ever and the creators even less. And in the case of "Intellectual" goods the advertisers grab all the money through link farms of mp3s or whatever and the creator gets absolutely damn all.
"May you rot... in your grave new world"
Other posters are assuming the ads get clicked on by humans. What are the odds that the page is carrying some Javascript that simulates a click the moment the page finishes loading. It just looks like the page redirected to the less knowledgeable. To the author though its that elusive step 3:
1) Get typo-squatting domain
2) Load it up with Google NonSense
3) PROFIT!
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