Google Profits from Typosquatting
Nowadays, typosquatters do not work only for themselves. Their activity often leads to a new category of services derived from their “profession.” Companies that protect brands, like we do, would certainly have less to do if typosquatters renounced their business and gave the squatted domain names back to their rightful owners.
But this is not the biggest source of revenue these web squatters create. Guess who profits most from typosquatting? Google, one of the web giants par excellence.
According to estimates by the prestigious Harvard Business School, Google might be earning between 32 and 50 million dollars annually thanks to typosquatting. This is mainly due to AdSense links placed on pages that profit from a brand’s popularity, and also from the fact that many web users are not able to tpye, sorry, type correctly…
But what exactly is typosquatting?
Typosquatting means that the website a web user finds is not at all the one he or she was hoping to find. It might be a competitor’s website, a website that is not suitable for minors or a (Google AdSense) page with links to different online shops.
The latter presents an inexhaustible source of revenue for Google. Each time a web user clicks on a Google advertising link on a typosquatted website, a part of the income generated is transferred to Google, while the owner of the website keeps the rest of the sum.
That’s the reason why Professor Edelman at Harvard Business School accuses Google and the typosquatting companies of profiting from poorly spelled registered brand names. Although it is hard to tell exactly how much money Google gains through this practice, it is known how many typosquatting sites exist: more than a million.
That’s why Professor Edelman has decided to take legal action against Google and several typosquatting companies, in the name of all American companies that have been the victims of typosquatting. As one single company stands a meager chance of winning against the giant Google (and its attorneys), Edelmann advises companies to join forces to combat this kind of fraud.
Sources:
Computerworld
itworld
Images: Google Images
Tags: brand infringement, google, typosquatting
