We all know how important it is to protect your brand when you’re registering your domain names, and getting your company or brand name in as many TLDs as possible is vital. But what about typo domains? There have been countless UDRPs where massive companies have had to retrospectively claw back domains that take advantage of typos of their own trademarks, and this is an expensive and often drawn out process.

Looking at it slightly differently, how much would you be willing to pay for a typo of a popular keyword? Recently domain auction providers have seen a number of typo domains commanding impressive sale prices, which at a glance may not even seem to be typos. This week cosmopoliton.com sold for $2,322 with emploment.com commanding an even higher price of $2,877.

Domainers have long disagreed about the value of keyword typo domains, some claim that they would never buy a typo domain as a premium, and would question whether it was even worth the normal registration fee. Others disagree, saying often when typos are common, if you ask people on the street how to spell the keyword, 50% of people would spell out the typo rather than the correct spelling. This makes the premium price on the domain worth it for direct type in traffic alone.

People have also commented that it’s possible there are a small percentage of people who bid up on these domains because they don’t actually realise they ARE typos. I would certainly hope the number is small, if it exists at all, but it would be an awful feeling to be one of these people if someone points it out!

Other domainers have commented that the increase in type in traffic for these domains may be to do with an increase in people whose first language is not English, accessing English content. Another observation is that it could just be down to declining literacy levels in many of the major markets!

Looking at the flip side of the argument, many people do not type “keyword.com” into their browser when looking for something specific, and use tools such as Google’s suggest or auto complete functions. With the rise of these services, it decreases the likelihood of anyone making an error when searching, and the correct spelling prevails.

In the past typo domains have commanded five figure sums when sold at auction, so these prices are small in comparison. It is perhaps an interesting trend to watch however, who knows, it could be the rise of the typo domain once again!

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