Estimating Visitors and Advertising Costs of Typo Domains
Tyler Moore & Benjamin Edelman - Web Appendix to Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting

It is difficult to know exactly how many people visit typosquatting domains. However, assessing the prevalence of typosquatting helps confirm the impact on consumers and advertisers. This page therefore provides estimates of the number of visitors reaching typo sites, as well as the fees advertisers pay to Google, the advertising platform we found to most frequently monetize typosquatting sites.

Our site traffic data comes from Alexa, which estimates the popularity of selected websites. For a sufficiently popular site, even the site's typosquatting misspellings receive enough traffic for Alexa to estimate their popularity. However, less popular sites receive too little traffic at their typosquatting variants for Alexa to report a rank for those typosquatting sites. We therefore begin our analysis by considering, and reporting in the table below, Alexa's estimates of the number of daily visitors browsing close typos of the 50 most popular .COM websites. On average, visitors to a site's typo domains total 0.7% of visits to the genuine site. Extrapolating with this percentage to consider all 3,264 popular sites studied in our article, we estimate that typo domains collectively receive at least 22.1 million daily visitors. If these typo domains were treated as a single website, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 36th most popular website in the world.

The preceding analysis considered only typos of the most popular 3,264 .COM sites. Expanding to the top 100,000 sites, retaining the 0.7% estimated ratio of typosquatting site, we estimate that typo domains collectively receive at least 68.2 million daily visitors. If these typo domains were treated as a single website, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 10th most popular website in the world. It would be more popular, in unique daily visitors, than twitter.com, myspace.com, or amazon.com!

How much do advertisers pay for this traffic? Our Table 2 reports that 57% of typo domains include Google pay-per-click ads, but prices and click-through rates vary across Google partners, and to our knowledge Google has never publicly reported its revenues from domain parking sites. To estimate Google's charges, we turn to Forbes coverage of a Trefis analyst report based on Google's recent SEC filings, concluding that Google's revenue per search is 3.5 cents. Meanwhile, Google's AdSense for Domains Case Study suggests that Google's domain parking prices are comparable to other Google prices, suggesting that it is appropriate to use Google's search prices to estimate charges on typosquatting sites. Combining these factors, and extrapolating across the top 100,000 sites with the other values estimated above, we estimate that Google's revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year. In fact, comparing domain parking sites to ordinary search results, we expect that the parking sites (including typosquatting sites) have a higher click-through rate (because they typically show only ads, and no other links) and a higher conversion rate (Google's case study suggests that twice the conversion rate of search). If so, advertisers' costs for typosquatting placements could easily exceed our estimates by a factor of two or more.

 

We found the listed typosquatting domains using the search process detailed in Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting. We built automated systems to classify the revenue sources of each typosquatting domain, as detailed in section 3. We collected this Alexa data in February 2010.

Popular site # daily visitors # daily visitors to close typo sites (%)
google.com 425060000 2566230 (0.60%)
yahoo.com 275370000 270060 (0.10%)
youtube.com 236830000 748000 (0.32%)
facebook.com 294050000 327820 (0.11%)
blogger.com 115540000 501560 (0.43%)
baidu.com 84000000 263780 (0.31%)
myspace.com 39160000 96640 (0.25%)
microsoft.com 47000000 66680 (0.14%)
rapidshare.com 31270000 228560 (0.73%)
wordpress.com 47670000 40240 (0.08%)
flickr.com 19370000 81510 (0.42%)
amazon.com 35750000 122840 (0.34%)
doubleclick.com 28020000 2930 (0.01%)
taobao.com 25010000 453460 (1.81%)
twitter.com 49050000 558670 (1.14%)
photobucket.com 19640000 28470 (0.14%)
skyrock.com 4335000 30720 (0.71%)
youporn.com 13430000 116110 (0.86%)
pornhub.com 16120000 109550 (0.68%)
conduit.com 20440000 6720 (0.03%)
youku.com 14880000 140950 (0.95%)
adobe.com 16590000 30780 (0.19%)
adultfriendfinder.com 8750000 33100 (0.38%)
redtube.com 10110000 145380 (1.44%)
dailymotion.com 10720000 12700 (0.12%)
friendster.com 3886000 35270 (0.91%)
apple.com 18820000 182290 (0.97%)
megavideo.com 14090000 8220 (0.06%)
tagged.com 5776000 19590 (0.34%)
tube8.com 11320000 113140 (1.00%)
rediff.com 8040000 22720 (0.28%)
naver.com 3360000 239140 (7.12%)
about.com 16700000 77660 (0.47%)
livedoor.com 11760000 560 (0.00%)
clicksor.com 10570000 3300 (0.03%)
mediafire.com 15290000 7280 (0.05%)
globo.com 8535000 95630 (1.12%)
megaupload.com 13640000 17840 (0.13%)
4shared.com 10430000 61030 (0.59%)
livejournal.com 10420000 16180 (0.16%)
livejasmin.com 33850000 14420 (0.04%)
linkedin.com 21370000 39310 (0.18%)
xvideos.com 11640000 212240 (1.82%)
netlog.com 4377000 8140 (0.19%)
metroflog.com 3635000 89090 (2.45%)
kaixin001.com 10720000 45740 (0.43%)
nytimes.com 11430000 108560 (0.95%)
weather.com 9620000 325940 (3.39%)
megaclick.com 7117000 640 (0.01%)
orkut.com 20000000 131790 (0.66%)
Total for top 50 domains 2184561000 8859180 (0.41%)