Malware on 12% of US Alexa Top 50 Sites’ Domain Typos
And 100% of them have domain typos that contain 3rd party advertising.
If a brand gets any significant amount of traffic you can be reasonably certain that typos of its domain name are being used by 3rd parties.
Occasionally those domain typos are simply registered and held, but in the majority of cases they display third party ads (usually Google Ads), redirect to affiliate programs, or are used to syndicate malware, phish users, or collect emails for SPAM. They’re registered because they receive traffic. Lots of traffic. And traffic is worth money. Money for the owner of the typo domain. Money for their advertisers or affiliates. Money for the malware installer. Nothing for the brand owner and a negative, and potentially harmful, experience for their users.
Typo Domains
Any major brand you check will have typo domains registered. Those domains are almost always active, in the sense that they are being redirected or monetized in some way.
Typo domains, as we define them, are domains similar to the brand domain that are clearly registered with the intent of capturing the visitors of the brand itself. It’s important that intent is evident. Domain owners are (and should be) free to own and hold variants of domains that are valuable or useful in their own right.
Typo domains come in a few broad types — examples for youtube.com:
- common misspellings and typos ex.
wwwyoutube.comoryoutub.com - word inflections ex.
youtubes.com - different TLDs ex.
youtube.pl
Typo domains are registered to:
- display 3rd party ads
- monetize through redirects and affiliate programs
- distribute malware, especially via browser plugins
- spam
- phish
- sell back to the brand
- defensively protect a brand by the brand owner
Why should I care about typo domains?
As a brand you likely care about where your users and new customers are ending up when they try to find you. There are many reasons why your domain typos are worth investigating or acquiring, both defensive and offensive. Here are two important ones:
Malware, Phishing, and SPAM
You likely care about your customers and users being redirected to malware, spammed, or phished when looking for your product or are trying to return to your site. Awareness and understanding that this is happening is the first step in taking action, warning your customers about it, or taking preventative measures.
Wasted Marketing Spend
Beyond malicious intent, if you do not own the typos of your brand, you are losing a percentage of your traffic to them (and therefore revenue). For every dollar you spend on marketing some percentage of visitors are going to the wrong domain, and so your return on the spend is being reduced by that amount. You may even be advertising to that visitor again on the typo domain through ad syndication and so paying for that visitor twice. Once when you first advertised to them, and once when they clicked on your ad again when they mistyped your domain. That’s a pretty inefficient way to spend money and a poor experience for your users or potential customers.
The Alexa 50 Top Sites in the US
If you want to see how prevalent domain typo usage is, look no further than the Alexa Top 50 Sites in the US. 100% of the websites on this list have 3rd party advertising showing on their typo domains and 12% have active malware on their typos. Below is the full list with detected advertising and malware. The malware number is even larger than 12% as we only classified domains we detected on malware and SPAM lists as having malware, and their coverage is never complete.
Typo domains are everywhere
If there is something we hope you take away from this, it’s to investigate your typo domains. Investigate with our tools, or just investigate yourself, but understand how they are being used and what some percentage of your users are experiencing. What you do with that knowledge is up to you, but we think it’s worth understanding the experience your users are having when finding your brand, whether they are your current users or new customers coming in from your marketing and sales channels.
Feel free to ask any questions about the data, our methodology, or typo domains and we’ll do our best to answer.
You can also check out a free report on your brand and domain name.
