CitizenHawk acquired by legal and brand services firm.
Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services (CLS) has acquired CitizenHawk, Inc., a company that helps companies protect their brands in domain names.
CitizenHawk is primarily a typosquatting recovery firm. It helps companies obtain typos of their domain names, often times ones that are held by cybersquatters.
Although its business model has shifted over the years, it primarily acquires typos with no upfront cost to the brand. It then monetizes the domain names for a couple years, sometimes through an affiliate program, as payment for recovering the domain name.
The company has come under scrutiny for filing boilerplate UDRP cases with language that clearly didn’t apply to the case at hand. In one such filing, the panelist decided the case was reverse domain name hijacking.
CitizenHawk has expanded its offerings beyond typosquatting in recent years. Typosquatting recovery on its own has a limited business size.
Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services, which says it serves 70% of Fortune 500 firms, will bring CitizenHawk under its Corsearch brand. Corsearch helps companies with trademark and brand clearance.
Nuno says
So how is this different from what many of us do? I’ve received bogus emails from them and then even contacted the trademarks that rejected having anything to do with them. If they monetize such domain without prior authorization from the brand they are acting as many affiliates, but they used legal excuses to grab the domain.
“It then monetizes the domain names for a couple years, sometimes through an affiliate program, as payment for recovering the domain name”
Andrew Allemann says
@ Nuno – it has an agreement with the trademark holder up front to obtain the domain names.
Typo Assassin (@typoassassin) says
We’ve detected typo domains for brands “under Citizenhawk’s watch” that were recently registered and stealing commissions (vs Citizenhawk making their commissions).
Note the difference between stealing and making 🙂
Also, they didn’t win 100% of the cases so in those cases they were simply changing who the brand wrote the check out to, in return for nothing.
Sure it’s a limited business size but their model could have been better and simpler, and the practice just keeps growing as EPC’s drop for traditional ppc lander income.