Google Possibly Earning $500 Million Yearly From Cybersquatting

Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University, through carefully analyzing data, have discovered that Google may be making roughly half a billion dollars on an annual basis through the actions of cybersquatting.

Cyberquatting is the act of registering a domain name with typos, trademark variations, etc with ill-intent to harvest traffic from the actual site. For example, thousands of individuals visit Erictric.com on a daily basis. A cybersquatter looking to get himself/herself a slice of our traffic pie could register a domain like ericric.com, in hopes that visitors will mistype our domain name, and be directed to their page instead.

A great example of a cybesquatted website is ccnn.com. Some users may accidentally type another “c” in “CNN”, and be directed to a page with advertisements.

What’s the point? Money, of course. If enough folks make typographical errors and get directed to a cybersquatting website, the owner of that domain/site is generating an income from your mistake (provided you’re clicking their ads, which many people do).

So what does Google have to do with this? Google’s got one of the internet’s top advertising schemes — Adsense. It’s so incredibly easy to implement AdSense on a domain name, even a caveman can do it. With every ad click on Google’s advertising network, you bet your bippy even Google’s getting a slice of that pie.

A note from a Google spokesperson indicates that Google will remove any AdSense publisher from advertising if they are discovered to be cybersquatting, according to New Scientist.

Cybersquatting has taken place since the internet’s infancy. Many of the original cybersquatters are now very wealthy individuals, sometimes holding hostage a domain name, prompting the rightful owner (of a trademark, for instance) to fork over cash to take custody of the domain during the dot-com bubble time period. Of course, things have changed massively on the ‘net with regard to intellectual rights since those times, but clearly, cybersquatting is still a problem.