Typo-squats (mis)spell danger to kids
p2pnet news | Advertising:- You deliberately spell the word incorrectly – ’six’ for ’sex,’ say, or perhaps ‘tat’ for ‘tit’.
It’s called typo-squatting and the idea is to lure you to sites, often porn sites, you wouldn’t otherwise go to.
And surprsingly, “Children’s sites are highly targeted by typo squatters,” says a new McAfee report, going on:
“The average for the category is 8.4% and 24 of the top most squatted sites are children’s properties for kids 12 and under.
“Add in sites like MySpace and Miniclip and more than 60 of the top most squatted sites are properties that appeal to the 18 and under demographic.”
But obviously, there’s more to it than that and, “Automated ad syndication services like Google’s AdSense enable a significant minority of typo-squatter sites to generate revenue,” says McAfee.
“Google-enabled advertising shows up on 19.3% of all suspected typo-squatter sites in this study. Yahoo-enabled advertising shows up on 4.4% of all suspected typo-squatter sites.”
And typo-squatters just love Apple.
“By the end of 2007, at least 8,000 URLs using the word iphone will be registered, according to a well known domain expert.,” says the report.
“The most valuable – iphone.com – is owned by Apple itself, but when Steve Jobs announced the product early in 2007, Apple didn’t own the iphone domain yet. One expert estimates that Apple paid at least $1 million to buy that piece of valuable Web real estate.
“Among the 8,000 registered URLs incorporating iphone are community fan sites, rumor and hack sites and, of course, scam sites. Freeappleiphonesnow dot com claims to offer free iPhones and variants that don’t even exist (like the iPhone ’shuffle’ and ‘nano’.) The URL is nothing more than a redirect to royalsweeps dot com. When we tested the site, we received debt consolidation offers, get rich quick solicitations, “free” cell phone prizes and other questionable e-mail.”
Other findings include:
Typo-squatting is vast and common, affecting every segment of the Web. 7.2% of the possible typographical errors we studied were actively squatting. In other words, a typical consumer who misspells a popular Web site URL has a 1 in 14 chance of landing at a likely typo-squatter site.
The five most highly squatted categories are game sites (14.0%), airlines (11.4%), main stream media company sites (10.8%), adult sites (10.2%) and technology and Web 2.0 related sites (9.6%).
Squatters follow consumer crowds. Popular, consumer-focused Web sites typically attract more squatters than business to business sites or niche content sites.
The incidence of pornographic content on non-adult typo-squatted sites is just 2.4%, suggesting improvement since previous studies by other researchers.
The increasing use of automation to buy and sell vast numbers of domains, combined with a 5-day free trial (known as ‘tasting’) for new registrations to top level domains like dot-com appear to be two significant factors in the rapid growth of typo-squatting.
At 3.4%, sites popular outside the U.S. are less than half as likely to be typo-squatted as overall sites.
The five non-U.S. countries most likely to have popular sites squatted are the United Kingdom (7.7%), Portugal (6.5%), Spain (5.9%), France (5.4%), and Italy (4.1%).
The five non-U.S. countries least likely to have popular sites squatted are the Netherlands (1.5%), Israel (1.1%), Denmark (1.0%), Brazil (0.9%) and Finland (0.1%).
The top five parking companies, ranked by the percentage of squatters parked by them, are Information (28.5%), Hitfarm (11.3%), Domainsponsor (2.9%), Sedo (2.5%) and GoDaddy (2.3%). Together, the top five park 47.5% of the squatters we discovered.
Meanwhile, a “typical consumer who misspells a popular Web site URL has a 1 in 14 chance of landing at a likely typo-squatter site,” says McAfee.
(Thanks, Rob)
Also See:
McAfee – What’s In A Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007, November, 2007
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November 21st, 2007 at 4:41 pm
im going to start domain squatting so i can get an iphone shuffle!