A Look at Domain-Squatting
Written by Ryan Carrigg (contact - e-mail) -- June 29th, 2007 | Share - Save - E-mailA recent Business 2.0 article offered a behind the scenes look at the highly lucrative and controversial business of domain-squatting. Featured in this piece was Kevin Ham, a man who has made a fortune simply by driving people to the sponsored links and ads on sites like Agoga.com.
Out of nowhere Agoga quickly ramped up to more than 1.5 million page views per month. Every time browsers click on one of the ads offered on Agoga and similar sites, Ham and fellow “domainers” cash in. It’s that simple.
Traffic is driven to cash generating portals like Agoga through a number of techniques; the most popular is funneling unassuming consumers from misspelled domains like myspace.cm.
The latest scheme being pulled off by industry experts like Ham is buying unregistered .cm domains. Since .cm is the URL country code of Cameroon, a deal is in place where the Government of the west African country gets a cut of the action as well. Other countries on the radar screen include Columbia (.co) and Oman (.om).
Not surprisingly, a look at the top ten most frequent .cm mishaps closely parallels the most popular sites. The frequency at which these typos occur is significant.
Interesting to note is that some typo culprits are making the same mistake more than once in a month. Myspace.cm sessions per person is 1.4 per month!!
Only the internet, the new Wild West, allows for a market that thrives on humans making mistakes. It kind of makes you wonder, what’s next?
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June 29th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Interestingly, of the top 10 .cm sites listed above, Yahoo is the only one that redirects to the proper place. Guess they have the better lawyers… ;)
June 29th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Just want to point out that according the the Business2.0 article, Agoga is not profiting by “buying unregistered .cm domains”. Instead, Ham’s arrangement with the government of Cameroon causes ALL unregistered .cm domains to redirect to Agoga by default through the use of wildcards.
A quick check just now, however, shows several of the high-profile .cm domains (google, myspace, etc.) are redirecting to variations of debtconsolidation.cc. Wildcards on the .cm TLD don’t seem to be redirecting anywhere.
July 1st, 2007 at 11:39 am
I was also going to say that Kevin Ham (Our hero!) has a system where they get all traffic to un-registered .cm domains and are trying to get the traffic from .co, .om, and others in the same way.
If you can’t beat them, join them is what I say…! :-)
Oh, could someone please delete the iphone spam comment?
Thanks!
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:54 am
Kevin Ham is one sly, sly domainer.
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:34 pm
It only bothers me that I did not think of it before him. We do live in the world of the land of opportunity and errors can equal dollars.
Mary
August 14th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Interesting way to rake in the dough. It would sure be interesting to see how yahoo, google, etc. see this -especially yahoo, who shells out $ every time someone clicks on an ad on agoga. But then again, they’re just paying for a different market base -the .cm mistakers! Brilliant idea.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
yes… this was the right answer… “We do live in the world of the land of opportunity and errors can equal dollars.”
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