To invest or not to invest in Typo Domain names

Every domainer have their own specialty and interests and this somehow reflects in the domain name investments that they have. Like any other industry, some people have principles or moralities while some are in it to profit no matter what. One of the border line for being a good or bad domainer is whether to invest in Typo Domain names…

… Before we inject morality or principles into our minds, let’s see the benefits of investing in typos.

• Brings direct type-in traffic to your domain name
• No marketing effort or expenses at all
• As the rightly spelled domain name goes up in traffic, so does yours
• A potential buyer that owns the rightly spelled domain name

This is why so many domainers do go and invest typos, it’s simply free traffic and requires no effort at all. And what usually happens is that the typo owner can then message the owner of the rightly spelled domain name to sell it at a very high price (especially once they know how much it means to you). What domainers usually do is buy and park, and profit from even hundreds of typo in their address bar. So why is it that a lot of domainers are investing in this? As not all domain names have trademark so it’s open for everyone to grab.

But let’s reverse the situation, say you do own the rightly spelled domain name, how would you feel if someone profited from your misspell? Here are some of the views against Typos:

• Law suits / UDRP challenges by rightly spelled domain name owner
• Downfall of rightly spelled domain name renders typos useless
• Can’t be developed as traffic would end up going back to the rightly spelled domain name.

Law suits can result to you having to turn over your domain name to the rightly spelled domain name owner and even have to pay a compensation fee for that (which probably goes beyond the profits you’ve made).

So should we invest?

It really comes down to what your goals are and how much your conscience can take. If your goal is to gain traffic to your website or earn from PPC or parking then it is a good path to invest as it really gets a lot of spill over traffic. But if you’re a developer, like myself, and appreciates a good developed domain name over a page full of ads and simply profiting from someone else’s hardwork then it’s not for you.

I wouldn’t go as far in this path. Although I did make a very honest and somehow stupid mistake when starting up which was registering Solveable.COM, which I thought was the right spelling. The good thing here is that at least the rightly spelled one is parked and has no trademark whatsoever. Plus SolveABLE would make a good brandable domain name one day.

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