WWW Prefix Typo Popular Among Trademark Infringers
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Study says WWW typo is most common prefix in trademark infringing domain names.
A new study from Corporation Service Company (CSC) — which provides trademark protection services — shows that www is the most common prefix to brand names used to “trademark infringers” in domain names. (The very common typo where someone forgets the dot between www and the domain name.)
Perhaps more interesting is that most companies that do own the www typo of their web site don’t actually forward it to their main web site. 67% of the www typos owned by the actual web site owner didn’t point to any active web site. 80% of the www typos owned by someone other than the web site owner pointed to pay-per-click pages.
CSC says the www typo of its own web site gets about 1% of the traffic of its web site.
CSC determined that the most common suffix added to trademarks is “online”. Surprisingly, the common “com” typo where someone forgets to enter a dot between the second level domain and ‘com’ is only ranked #5.
The study looked at 100 randomly selected brands as well as all filed UDRP cases.
Further Reading:
- Nationnal.com and Natiional.com – One is a Trademark Typo, the Other Isn’t
- WIPO gives Twitter popular typo Twittr.com
- Popular .Music Initiative Files US Trademark Application
Tags: domain names, trademarks
I’ve noticed this before. I once checked through the top 1000 Alexa sites and only about 2 or 3 of top 1000 did not have the wwwdomain.tld taken. (i did not register the available ones by the way, I was just researching for curiosity sake)
also I have noticed that it is pretty impossible to find http://www.tld in any extension that is not registered, normally they go early in the landrush phase ..
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