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Google’s Annual Revenue From Typosquatting At $497m.

Most people regard typos (Typo squatting) as nuisances, just inconsequential mistakes that cause them to lose a second of time hitting the backspace key.  But for Google, typos may equal big business, as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that they make the search engine giant $497 million per year.

Edelman and Moore, coauthored a paper titled “Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders.”  In a blog post summarizing it, they presented several sets of statistics and wrote, “According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads.”

Then they made a rather more interesting comment regarding the effect of Google’s connection: “Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typo-squatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year.”

Also, Google’s pretty much the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

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