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Surprises

by Joseph Weisenthal

Thu, Dec 28th 2006 10:48pm





The Big Business Of Typos

from the domane-names dept

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.

6 Comments | Leave a Comment

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  1.  
    identicon
    Zach, Dec 28th, 2006 @ 11:47pm

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

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  
    icon
    Mike (profile), Dec 29th, 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...

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Dec 29th, 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.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  
    identicon
    Sal S., Dec 29th, 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.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Dec 29th, 2006 @ 10:52am

    You guys smell

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  6.  
    identicon
    Beck, Dec 29th, 2006 @ 11:17am

    Morgage and Mortage Same Owner?

    The two domain names morgage.com and mortage.com are hosted at the same IP address.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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