It appears that someone has spent time investigating the potential ad revenue from websites that are misspelled variations of popular websites. Surprisingly, a viable business model is to register misspelled website domains, and simply post ads relevant to the real website (or to the real website), to ultimately generate a decent profit.
But is there anything wrong with that? The authors of the study think so, and they have launched a lawsuit seeking damages from Google for facilitating this practice with their Adsense for Domains tool.
To me, this is a classic example of market fulfilling a niche function. There is nothing stopping businesses buying the domains which are misspellings of their own if they are willing to pay more than the value of revenue generated by advertising to the current domain name owner. Further, I would suggest that typing a web address to navigate to a site is fast becoming obsolete as you can generally navigate to the site with less typing by using a search engine.
In other news, the Brisbane Young Economists Network is hosting an event in Brisbane on the 4th March. Pecha Kucha presentations will be given by some local economics PhDs, drinks are supplied, and there will be plenty of time for socialising.
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