With news this week that Facebook have recovered over a dozen misspelt domain names, the question is how much is a typo domain name worth to your brand? Some argue that you should get a discount for the cost of a misspelling to your brand, and that they are not worth much in terms of search results, while others deem that a misspelt typo domain can be worth its weight in gold due to the amount of direct traffic that you would get from a consumers spelling mistake.
Facebook are firmly in the camp of the latter, having recovered domains such as acebook.com and facebool.com; common mistypes on a QWERTY keyboard. These aren’t the first domain mistypes that Facebook have started lawsuits to claim, and in the past they have used the UDRP process to claim domains that were using the Facebook trademark, deeming it cybersquatting. The brand is intent to protect their intellectual property and reclaiming these names is a large part of the process. Until recently, the details of the owners of these domains were protected by the WHOis privacy service, but the details of these people were subsequently revealed, allowing Facebook lawyers to start the process of claiming the names back.
Domain auctions prove that a great deal of people feel that the mistype of a domain is just as important as the actual domain, with employment.com selling for nearly three thousand dollars, and cosmopoliton.com selling for nearly two and a half thousand in an auction in July of this year. With statistics showing that 50% of people on the street asked to spell a keyword, fifty percent would get it wrong, meaning that the mistyped word is just as important as the correct spelling.
It is recommended that when you are registering a domain for your brand, you register as many extensions as you can, for brand protection. This is good as it means that it is less likely for spammers and cyber squatters to infringe on your brand, so it seems sensible to register the most common spelling mistakes at the same time, to further your brand protection.
In the past, spelling mistake domain names have commanded five figure sums at auction, although with the recent advent of Google Instant to our searches, it is less likely to make a spelling mistake. Could this be the end of typo domain name services as we know it?
If you have a prominent brand and there is a misspelling domain purchased that you cannot claim back, it is prudent to place a domain back order to catch it if the current owner decides to let it drop.