Domain squatting is one business model which some companies choose to completely focus on. For example, such a company is FabulousDomains.com. The company’s entire business model is wrapped around buying domains which they think may be profitable in the future.
I must admit, I have been guilty of this in the past, but I quickly faded out of the business because it’s really a sleazy business. I’m sure you have seen those hundreds of thousands domains across the Internet which are “parked,” purely there to make money and not actually provide any kind of service to you.
But lets get to the point.
Goggle.com is a classic and great example of domain squatting — whether you like it or not.
The domain was first registered in 2003, only six years after Google.com was first registered. Sure, it’s quite possible Google just didn’t think about this in the first place and got sloppy, but either way, goggle.com is owned by someone other than Google Inc.
Let’s take a look at some of the visible metrics for goggle.com:
These stats prove that day in and day out, Internet users around the world type in the wrong domain. Google receives hundreds of millions of hits per day, seems like a decent amount of that traffic actually goes to the wrong domain.
So what is goggle.com doing to monetize that typo type-in traffic? “Free” offers provided by FluxAds, which then redirects you to a MyExclusiveRewards partner page. Seems like these “free” offers were a huge success, one year ago, but now they are worthless and it’s so hard to actually make them work now.
I feel there is a lot more that the domain goggle.com could actually be doing to monetize the traffic, but they certainly are receiving some decent web traffic without even trying. The $45 they spent to buy this domain was worth its weight in gold, when they purchased the domain over 4 years ago.
