Fairwinds Partners conducted research that took a look at Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide and then broke down the list to focus on the top 50 brands whose names were not based on generic terms and did not represent houses of brands.
They came to a lot of interesting conclusions, a couple are as follows:
- On the reclaim side, we found that UDRPs are not filed strategically, with only 10% of domains awarded via the UDRP meeting our criteria. That is to say, the majority of domains targeted via UDRP are not worth the effort, time, or money involved in the reclaim process.
- Traffic to typo variations of 50 of the most popular internet retail brands alone is worth over $70,000,000 per year.
- More than 80% of typosquatted domain names that are associated with holiday shopping and receive significant levels of traffic contain phishing scams, malware, ransomware, or divert shoppers to competing retail sites.
- Companies own too many unnecessary names. While we found Bed, Bath & Beyond to be one of the companies that owns the most criteria-matching domains, they also own more than ten times this number, or 154 other typo domains, that did not meet our criteria and, hence, are not valuable.
The report was very interesting and it did show some of the mistakes brands are making by not identifying which typos to secure. Possibly some brands don’t care or will not allot the resources. They just focus on a blatant attempt to mislead the consumer.
Well worth the read for domain investors and anyone running a website.
Glad to see a brand protection firm speaking frankly about wasteful UDRP filings and the excesses of defensive registrations.
My respect for Fairwinds just doubled.