Markets in everything

Google makes 1/2 billion dollars a years off of your typos. A typosquatter might register "emiratseconomist.com" in the hope of getting visits from people who meant to type "emirateseconomist.com".

Moore and Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular .com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.

They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.

If the top 100,000 websites suffer the same typosquatting rate as the sites Moore and Edelman studied, up to 68 million people a day could visit a typo site, they say. They estimate that almost 60 per cent of typo sites could have adverts supplied by Google.

If the company earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, they conclude.

Moore and Edelman's papers Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting and Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting.