Majority of estimated “losses” are from keyword search engine bidding.
MarkMonitor just released a “Brandjacking” report (pdf) about online hotel bookings, estimating that large hotel brands lose over $2 billion a year in lost bookings and unnecessary commissions. The bulk of these losses are from competitors and travel agencies bidding on hotel brand names in search ads.
Also included in the report is a study of cybersquatting of 5 top hotel brands. MarkMonitor says it found 2,100 cybersquatted domain names of the five brands which collectively deliver over 57 million visits a year.
Much of this cybersquatting is from lesser-known competitors to these brands, not traditional PPC cybersquatters.
MarkMonitor is a brand protection firm, so you should read the report with a grain of salt. How the company calculated the lost bookings and commissions isn’t detailed in the report, and you can rest assured that they were anything but conservative.
Consider one notorious example from brand advocacy group CADNA, which claimed that clicks from typos of sites such as Google and YouTube averaged $2.74 per click. CADNA said its source for the figure was a VeriSign report, but the number is nowhere in the cited report. (It later adjusted the figure downward to $2.03 while not explaining its faulty reference from before. This number is still way too high, perhaps by a figure of 50 or more.)
One more thing about the MarkMonitor report: is it just me, or does it equate domainers with cybersquatters on the illustration on page 4?
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