Typo Squatter loses Thousands of Dollars Due to Missed Details
Update: the mystery is finally solved
Setting
This yesterday, I mistyped the URL as I was visiting Google this morning; I accidentally typed http://www.google.cm. This redirected me to a page on the domain of http://www.agoga.com, which actually looked like a somewhat convincing, spartan page, very similar in style to what you would often see if your browser. Except that it also contained a search bar, and a few unobtrusive links to subject like ‘Travel’, ‘Cars’ etc., the kind of subjects you would see on a typical parked domain page.
I thought that was kind of interesting, a way of monetizing typos that looked to me at least like it would be somewhat effective way of squatting a typo. At the time, though, it didn’t seem noteworthy enough to me to give it further thought.
A little later, I was trying to get to Paypal, and again I accidentally typed http://www.paypal.cm. Once again I was at the same page. I was intrigued, and began experimenting by checking a variety of other domains with the .cm extension. Many big names in the industry had the .cm TLD pointed to the same page I had viewed earlier.
That also, is not that notable. A squatter could easily have registered a whole variety of company names in that TLD - it’s done all the time, and is considered a valid tactic for making some money off of parked domains.
What made it notable finally is when I started entering random domains, and sequences of characters in the .cm TLD. such as http://sdfjhksd.cm and http://www.oiyt.cm. These also are pointing to a landing page on agoga.com, albeit a different landing page from the ones used on major domain mispellings.
Agoga.com has every unregistered .cm TLD pointed to their landing pages!
While there are a bunch of legitimately registered .cm sites which resolve elsewhere, any other .cm domain, whether nonsense characters or misspellings of ‘real’ domain names resolves to the same IP address which is a cluster at agoga.com. The only way this could be accomplished is to change the default site settings of the master DNS serving the .cm TLD. Agoga must have either hacked the .cm registrar in Cameroon, or paid the registrar off for this. Either way, I suspect something illegal has occurred here; I doubt this type of redirecting is approved by IANA.
Opportunity
How much type-in traffic would you think would be generated by people misspelling .com as .cm? Agoga.com has an Alexa Rank of 6,915 which indicates thousands or tens of thousands of visitors per day by some estimates. Keep in mind that this site has not been running for even three months yet; today’s Alexa rank was 2,913.
Since Alexa ranking is biased towards a technical crowd, I think it is safe to assume that the true numbers are fairly large. Now, it is easily attainable that a proper landing page optimized for Pay-Per-Click advertisements will result in a 30%-40% click-through-rate. Especially if one was to put some effort into ensuring the advertisements were targeted around the domain name or keywords at the similar .com page.
It is obvious that with this type of traffic, Agoga.com could be pulling in some huge advertising revenue - as much a $1000-$2000 per day. They should have it made in the shade, for all intents and purposes. But, they have screwed up royally.
How did they screw up?
Agoga will return you to one of two landing pages, depending on what type of domain you enter. One version, which they seem to use when squatting the domain of a large company or popular website, can be seen at . The other, which they seem to use for the domains of smaller websites and nonsense or misspelled domains can be seen at http://www.oeiurt.cm (note the random domain name…) or http://www.caydel.cm (a typo of this domain) or at the Agoga main page at http://www.agoga.com.
The first type of landing page is broken - The first type of landing page is relatively well done - it is minimal, and could easily get the user to click onto their main site. The problem lies in that no ads are served if the user enters certain search queries. While an advertising page is shown if the user enters a query such as ‘digital cameras’, ‘dvd’, ‘knitting’, other queries such as ‘infohatter’, ‘caydel’ or whatever return nothing. Sure, probably nobody is bidding on that term; wouldn’t it be a better plan to grab the first result from a Google query for that term, scrape it for keywords, and return ads based on that? Potentially millions of long-tail opportunities are being missed here, thrown away for no good reason.
The second type of landing page broken - The script that Agoga used to generate the second style of landing page is broken. Any search query or link click redirects you to the same page you just left, with a nice photo of a mountain range, or other scenery visible in place of the advertisements that should be shown. They are making nothing from this type of landing page; in fact, they are losing money due to bandwidth costs.
Opportunity Missed
I would be willing to bet that the majority of the traffic that Agoga.com receives will end up at the second landing page, the broken one. While they probably have their highest traffic domains such as http://www.google.cm pointing to their ‘working’ script, they are missing out on the whole long-tail of domain misspellings. Think about it this way - any mistake made by anyone anywhere when he misspells .com as .cm will send him to the broken script. This could be anyone typing in one of a billion domains.
Additionally, a fair number of people who misspell the the domains of large sites such as Google will make multiple mistakes - they may mispell google.com as google.cm, but how many are prone to make multiple mistakes such as gogle.cm or googel.cm and be sent to the broken page?
What Are You Trying to Tell Us Here?
The point of what I am trying to say should have become clear by this point, but I will write it out nice and neat anyways: an neglect of details can lose you a lot of money. I do not know if this second landing page has ever actually worked for Agoga. Perhaps it has, and only stopped working 15 minutes before I stumbled upon it the first time. Perhaps it has never worked. The fact of the matter is, the person or persons who own Agoga.com (Whois data indicates Nameview, Inc, BTW) are losing thousands of dollars per day. It is probably safe to assume that they don’t even realize this; if they did, they would fix it in realtively short order.
The people responsible for this had an amazing idea, which they ran with 90% of the way to the perfect money-making opportunity. But they have missed a few small details which are costing them perhaps thousands of dollars per day. If they were to fix these small problems, they could probably nearly double their income.
I appreciate your comments and feedback!
Wow, I’ve been on those pages a bunch of times and never thought to question what I was seing, nice pick up mate!
Thanks for the info, I have a special problem, at my computer google.cm used to open by itself, now agoga.cm does open itself even if not typed in, so there must be a virus or trojan combined with these pages, but I have not found any hints how to get rid of it.
Hmmm…. I have never seen anything like you describe before. Have the ‘typical’ scanners (such as AVG, Symantec etc. picked it up?
I will keep an ear out for you, and if I find anything more about it, I will make a post!
i have a virus or trojan with the same problem. ran a new programm (spywarestuff) over it and didnt find it … it just starts the internetexplorer (i deinstalled the internet-explorer so i dont know where the **** this is coming from) and shows me http://agoga.com
you would only want to do that if you really have something bad in mind, like finding active IP’s to hack on…
well thats what i think…
woww..
ok .. then again .. maybe i am tottally stupid or this could be it.
so i write this again because i think the first reply i made was catched by my “changed” internetExplorer.
i deinstalled internetExplorer but it still starts up randomly with agoga.com as starting page. it could be a virus to trap people. to find there IP’s and just try to hack em. or its a trojan calling home ..
i tried software to deinstall it, but it keeps coming back.
this doesn’t feel good.
greetz from the netherlands and keep up the good work. take em down for me would ya
maybe i am wrong .. because now it came through .. sorry for the reply mess i made…
No problem - after I manually approve your first comment, it then starts to let you post them without my intervention.
I’ve heard from a lot of people about having their IE automatically send them to Agoga.com - I will look into this further and probably write another blog post about it.
Thank you for reading!
backdoor trojan. wonder if it is related to the winfixer trojan.
I doubt whoever owns agoga.com is intentionally setting a virus; that doesn’t make good business sense for them. Setting the bookmark does - they get repeat traffic. Perhaps they are initiating a pay-per-install software download?
I still mean to do an updated post on this, just having trouble getting the information and finding the time
.
Thanks for your comments so far, all.
does anyone allready knows where it comes from?
i got the same thing with agoga popping up, but massively like 20 pages or so.
only when i have an active internet communication on.
so i turned it off and now my pc won’t even boot anymore.
greetz from the netherlands send by pda.
I know next to nothing about these things, but do need help with this agoga.com thing. It never actually shows on my screen, but every time I go online it instantly appears in my History after I open IE which goes straight to the msn.com home page. Even after dumping all temp internet files, cookies, cached, etc. I even installed Norton Sysyem Works 2007 and got all updates, cleaned up everything, still no luck. I never see the actual web page unless I open History and click on it. Thanks a lot for any insight on this, there is not very much of it on the net.
Heyy came across this site with a google search about agoga, and if i can add my own 2 cents. first off well written article going into all the details about the money losing business plan they have set up. I personally havent found a solution to this agoga problem, except to manually change your host file. even though its almost theoretically impossible to add every misspelled .cm website to your host file, instead i just added the websites that i normally spell wrong like google.cm,gmail.cm, woot.cm etc. to me its an easy fix for now, and as i type more websites i just add them. hope this gives some insight for a temp solution for some people. and as a side note for those who dont know what a host file is….. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_file. peace. charles.
host file link is dead. new one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOSTS_file
Thank you for the host file thingie, it works so far, well at least it won’t take me to the annoying agoga website anymore.
Another very interesting, yet troublesome finding: if you go to google and type in ‘agoga.com spyware’, see what happens.
For ppl that don’t want to try: it shuts down your browser immediately. I tried using Firefox and IE7.
This must be some sort of malware from my point of view, I have no idea how I got it though….
Their intentions can’t be right
After checking Process Explorer, I found that I had this process running, so I killed it and now just wait to see if it works..
http://www.spyany.com/files/sxserv101_exe.html
-Pieter-
[…] Ob darüber schon berichtet wurde? Ich habe nichts gefunden. Es geht um eine Geschichte die Brian Vuyk schon im November recherchiert hat. Nämlich um ganz besondere Geschäfte mit Tippfehler-Domains. Die werden reichlich gemacht mit verdrehten Buchstaben, Auslassungen und allerlei geschickter Kombinatorik. Aber auch die TLD selbst kann in Beschlag genommen werden. Vertippt man sich bei der Eingabe einer .com Adresse und lässt das "o" fehlen, gibt also domain.cm in die Browserleiste ein, passiert das Wunder. Sämtliche Anfragen, von wenigen registrierten Ausnahmen abgesehen, werden auf die Website Agoga.com weitergeleitet - egal was man eintippt. Dort findet sich, selbstverständlich, nichts als Werbung. So etwas ist in Kamerun möglich, denn dorthin gehört .cm. Agoga erfreut sich über anhaltenden Traffic und bringt es so auf einen Alexa-Rang von derzeit immerhin 4,137. Für schwarzafrikanische Verhältnisse sicherlich ein gutes Geschäf.Popularity: unranked […]
[…] Einen etwas ausführlicheren Beitrag zu diesem Thema gibt es auf caydel.com. […]
I actually decided to buy a domain to see if this misspelled iea woudl work a few months back. I purchased UltimateSuccessCD.com and signed up for their affiliate program ….their normal site is UltimateSuccesCDs.com (notice the “s” on CD). To date I have made around $200 USD in commissions on that 8$ domain name. I wish I could find other types of sites. That would be nice
Jason and other potential Cyber-Squatters,
You are domain squatting and most likely prone to litigation by the trademark holder. You seriosly rethink your get rich quick plan especially when you get smacked with a $10000+ lawsuit. At best you may have a UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution) filed against you and lose the domain. Once you lose the domain because you have been labeled a bad actor, i.e. Trademark infringer, the company will use the UDRP as exhibit one in the lawsuit to collect damages.
If you register and profit off of generic domains (beeers.com) then you are safe from litigation. In the Internet age companys are more aggressive in Brand Management and Protection. I am just giving out free advise so you don’t fall into the court system on the wrong side of the law.
Good luck and you might want to think about spending the $200 on a good suit so you at least look presentable before the Judge.
I chanced upon the .cm agoga deal here
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm
http://www.englishrussia.com/?p=199
LOL. Screwed up? Man, nothing like completely and utterly making an assessment of the situation and getting it totally and completely wrong.