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geekerati
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 Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 2:13 pm Post subject: The Typo Millionaires |
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The Typo Millionaires
The sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet—and how to kill it off once and for all.
By Paul Boutin 
Friday, Feb. 11, 2005, at 2:54 PM PT
| Quote: | There's one Internet scam that's unavoidable, at least if your typing is as bad as mine. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. When I worked at HotBot a decade ago, part of my job was to handle the angry, confused callers who stumbled into the parallel universes of htobot.com and hotbto.com. At a boom-era party in Silicon Valley, I met a woman who'd goosed her income by developing software that took a list of the most-visited Web sites, calculated the most likely typos that surfers would make trying to reach them, and automatically registered those domains if they were available. She then raked it in by serving ads to the accidental tourists who landed on her sites.
Various studies have estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day. From my own experience that sounds about right—I can spell just fine but I leave out characters, transpose them, or hit the wrong key at least 10 times a day. No wonder wave after wave of entrepreneurs have fought to tap that flow and turn it into cash. And you know what type of entrepreneur. Typo traffic supposedly generated a million bucks a year for John "Cupcake Party" Zuccarini, a Florida man who registered as many as 3,000 typos of popular domains. God bless American entrepreneurs, I say, but Zuccarini made the mistake of serving p--n to kids who misspelled sites like cartoonnetwork.com. He was arrested in 2003 for "us[ing] a misleading Web address to draw children to pornography."
I'd never suggest that steal.com exists solely to grab dyslexic Slate readers, but who are the folks at wwwslate.com kidding? Shoe shoppers who mistype www.zappos.com as wwwzappos.com get pictures of women who are wearing shoes but not much else. Then there are sites like whitehouse.com—right spelling, wrong URL. The site's owner told the Associated Press last year that he decided to sell his famous p--n site because his son was getting old enough to start asking questions. As of right now, the front page hints that "Something big is coming." |
Slate/lots more
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