I’m sure you’ve all misspelled a website and instead of getting a standard page that says the url doesn’t exist, a website will appear, look relatively official, with a number of links on the page.
Do people actually make money from these pages? If I quickly mistype straightdope.com as straigthdope.com and hit enter, another website will pop up. The website says:
Straigthdope.com - “what you need, when you need it.” and it has a bunch of crap I’m not going to bother describing. But, you CAN click your way out of the page if you want to. My reaction to a typo is to immediately back out and re-type it. Or in the case of a frequently visited site, I’d just bookmark it. I’d never see the site depending on me to mistype the site name.
So, someone had to buy Straigthdope.com, create the website, pay for the hosting, and whatever miscellaneous expenses come with the website… and for what purpose? The only way someone can get to the website is if someone makes a typo, and then, that person would have to look over the page and select a link (I assume) for you to make any money.
Or is the fact that I’ve made the typo and come to the site enough to add a few pennies to your bank account?
I’m not seeing the profitability in this business model. Can anyone explain this to me?
You’re misunderstanding the point. The money to be made is having the URL, which they can later sell. It’s not multiple sites being hosted. Each company that does this has a large group of websites that point to the same place. Multiple domains is actually not that expensive. And they buy enough of them that they can make money.
And, no, if only clicking links made money, the model wouldn’t work. The number of people who click through is rather small. And while those people are more valuable than average because they are more likely to complete a sale. merely getting your ad out is worth a lot. I mean, the model we’ve been using for years doesn’t have a way to make a sale immediately, and yet they are worth a lot. In fact, don’t they sell for more?
It’s not just about selling the domain. You can go to GoDaddy and use their cash parking service to put targeted ads on your fake site. No hosting or content management needed, just tell GoDaddy the types of links out you want to have on your page and you get revenue from clicks. And so does GoDaddy.
So, if you buy amozon.com* and tell GoDaddy to link to booksellers, you’ll probably get some good click-throughs from people who just click on the Amazon.com link on your page (assuming GoDaddy puts it up there) instead of re-typing.
I got to do free Cash Parking on my account (I’ve got over 100 domains), which I use for a handful of defunct domains that are not misspellings. I don’t make diddly-squat on them, but no one is accidentally looking for my domain names.
Apparently what you guys are describing is big business in Cameroon, by virtue of the domain extension .cm. Think of how many hundreds upon thousands of domain can be “typoed” in this fashion.
I know someone who has done that with URLs to popular dating sites. He makes about $300 a year in Google ad revenue (over a couple of URLs). But he also buys domains in bulk and probably gets a discount. But hey, he can buy some sort of tech toy each year or something of the like.
