FairWinds Partners released a study about the costs of typosquatting the top 250 trafficked brand domain names. The lengthy report outlines traffic and revenue losses, poor user experiences, and a lot more. The single key take away from the study is that “typosquatting costs the brands associated with these sites $327 million per year” – view the entire study here.

Sedo posted some interesting sales today. First up a Youtube typo domain – youtugbe.com sold for $4,242 and is currently parked at Parked.com with Youtube as the domain’s title tag and title… looks like a clear case of trademark infringement and cybersquatting.

The other domain I found interesting is the domain balldontlie.com that sold for $3,250. Turns out Ball Don’t Lie is the name of a sports blog on Yahoo. The domain currently goes no where as it has no name servers. Yahoo recently purchased OMG.com for $80,000 for their celebrity blog called by the same name, that domain forwards to omg.yahoo.com.

Typo domains come in a variety of forms but one of the most common besides misspellings is “www” added to the actual domain such as: wwwtwitter.com notice that it’s all one word, which is the domain that is redirecting to TechCrunch. According to a whois lookup the domain is registered GoDaddy, created 11/04/2007 with an expiration of 11/04/2014. It also has Domains by Proxy privacy protection and is also sitting on GoDaddy’s name servers meaning that the redirect is setup within the owners GoDaddy domain control panel.

The term twitter is trademarked and should be easy for Twitter to get via UDRP, but the question remains. Does TechCrunch, who frequently blogs about the company own this domain or is it someone else that owns the domain and is doing the redirecting?

Either way it doesn’t reflect well on domainers.

Update:
Six days after this was published TechCrunch wrote their own post on the topic.