Making money with typo error

With millions of websites name belonging to the .com domain, a company has a very clever idea of tapping into a typo mistake of surfers who wish to browse into a .com site but instead typing .cm

Take for instance, instead of typing www.google.com, he or she type www.google.cm and when that happened the browser will be redirected to a landing page called www.agoga.com that is filled with advertisements. All unregistered .cm domains will be rerouted to www.agoga.com and agoga.com make money from advertisements as a result of the typing mistake by the surfers.

.com domains are reserved for commercial or private sites, whereas .cm domains are supposed to be for sites parked or originated from Cameroon.

From TechCrunch: The .CM Scam

A domain name broker managed to convince the government of Cameroon, which controls .cm, to do a deal where any mis-typed domain name, like Google.cm (instead of google.com), takes the visitor to an advertising-filled landing page (the ads are served by Yahoo).

The .CM pages are served based on a wildcard. If the domain has not been registered, the user is redirected to agoga.com. Since the redirects are taking place via a wildcard, and domains are not actually being registered, there is little trademark holders can do to fight this (other than register the domain themselves).

This is actually one of the cleaner scams occurring in the extremely dirty domain name business. ICANN, which oversees top level domains like .com, .net and .info, has no oversight or regulatory powers over the two-letter country code domains like .cm. It’s up to the individual countries to decide what is ethical and what isn’t. And when money is thrown at these small countries, it seems that they have little hesitation in giving control of their namespace to a relatively unknown speculator.

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From MonetizeTraffic: .CM Domain Names - A Barely Tapped Gold Mine

The nation of Cameroon owns that top level domain (TLD) of .CM and they are redirecting all unresolved traffic to a very lame and generic PPC landing page which syndicates AdWords results. You can see an example of it at google.cm. They must get significant traffic from all of the typos of users leaving out the o in .com domain names.

Setting aside the ethical issue with basically typo-squatting the entire .com domain space, this could be a great way for a poor African nation to raise some money. However, they could easily boost their revenue by building customized landing pages for the most frequently accessed domains. For example, amazon.cm should either redirect to the Amazon.com affiliate links or a page targeted towards ecommerce. I can’t even imagine how much money they are leaving on the table. The folks at NameView.com, who appear to be providing the landing pages, are doing them an a huge disservice here.


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