Domainers love typos. These people make their living by setting up link pages using domain names that surfers are likely to type in error. When you land on one of them and distractedly click on one of their links you generate advertising revenue for the happy domainer.
It’s a profitable business. So profitable in fact that a new market is developing where domainers resell good typo domains to each other, at ever increasing prices. It reminds you of the old joke about the two friends who keep selling each other the same bicycle, jacking up the price at each trade. When one of the two decides to keep the bicycle the other complains: "We were making a fortune!"
A good typo can now sell for thousands of dollars.
Typo prices are starting to reach levels previously seen only in trades on legitimate premium domain names. It is an insider’s market, with specialised websites and chat-rooms. Transactions almost exclusively deal with English typos. Florida seems to be the epicentre but the quality of English in those chat-rooms makes you wonder if many are not from Russia, Central Europe, Korea or South America.
We took a stroll through these forums and websites to check the current level of prices for typos. Record price tags seem to be reserved for typos of high notoriety trademarks, but so called generic typos are getting more expensive too.
A generic typo is one that concerns a general industrial or commercial sector rather than a well known trademark. To illustrate:
chrysler.com is the legitimate trademark owner’s site;
crysler.com is a typical trademark typo, in this case used by the trademark owner;
automobile.com is a legitimate generic name;
automobil.com is a typical generic typo and leads to a page full of links.
Here are a few recently recorded sales for trademark typos.
MySpac.com was sold in December 2005 for $31,600. This seems to be the current record. It is a typo of MySpace.com, a famous social networking site with 100m members. Its lesser cousin ySpace.com was sold for "only" $12,030 in June 2005.
YallowPages.com, typo for YellowPages.com, changed hands for $13,100, on September 14th, 2006.
CitiFinacialAuto.com, a slightly more complicated typo for the auto finance site only reached $2,740 also very recently, in September 2006.
Generic typos fetch lower prices but the market is rising.
The record so far seems to be for programing.com (missing one "m") which was snapped up very recently for $6,100.
A rarer German language generic typo Immobilen.com, (immobilien means real estate in German) sold for $3,100 also in September 2006.
We even found a French typo Wikypedia.fr (instead of Wikipedia the online encyclopedia). It is for sale, but not yet sold at the time of writing.
Good typos for the best known trademarks are practically all taken now. At first domainers were the takers. But now trademark owners have caught on and are registering their own typos to keep them out of the hands of the bandits. For this study we generated hundreds of typos of the name chrysler.com using a proprietary algorithm from http://indom.com. All 10 of the most dangerous typos are already taken: 6 lead to link pages, 1 advertises the name for sale, 2 are registered but inactive and 1, crysler.com leads to the legitimate carmaker’s website.
Conclusion: any domain name owner with a high web traffic site should seek protection by asking a specialist domain registrar to generate the most dangerous typos and register them before the domainers pounce. If your name is not yet a big hitter but is planned to become one, act before anyone else can. There are hundreds of professional domain traders watching. It is their livelihood so they keep trying until they find a good name and then are hellishly difficult to dislodge.
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