The Big Business Of Typos

from the domane-names dept

Thu, Dec 28th 2006 10:48pm — Joseph Weisenthal

There's no doubt that 2006 was a hot year for the domain name speculation business. The address diamond.com sold for $7.5 million this year, tying the price that business.com sold for during the last business. And of course the derivative business of typosquatting was also quite hot, with many trying to get into the act of buying up domain names that are just a letter or two different from a common brand. So it's not surprising that the two trends came together, resulting in the address mortage.com getting sold for $242,000, the 23rd biggest sale of the year (even though Morgage.com seems like the more likely typo). All of these domain name purchases seem rather risky, but the big prices being paid for typos seem even more so, considering all of the efforts to stamp them out, and prevent users from accidentally surfing towards them.

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6 Comments

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Zach, 28 Dec 2006 @ 11:47pm

I'm still trying to decide whether the typo in "typosquatting" was intentional or not....
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Mike (profile), 29 Dec 2006 @ 12:18am

Re:
I'm still trying to decide whether the typo in "typosquatting" was intentional or not....

Ha! I do not believe it was intentional, so I fixed it...
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Dec 2006 @ 4:31am

"even though Morgage.com seems like the more likely typo"

Maybe it's just me but I can instantly see "morgage" is incorrect but "mortage" is just a tad more difficult.
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Sal S., 29 Dec 2006 @ 5:40am

There's nothing risky in typos of generic domains where the content that is used is similar in nature to the generic's meaning. "mortage" falls into that category.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Dec 2006 @ 10:52am

You guys smell
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Beck, 29 Dec 2006 @ 11:17am

Morgage and Mortage Same Owner?
The two domain names morgage.com and mortage.com are hosted at the same IP address.
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