I once owned a typo of a top ten website which was bringing me 80,000 uniques a month. But as some have already mentioned , most of the time the typo cannot provide anything close to what the visitor is expecting and I could not convert the traffiic, the bounce rate was 99%. I ended up pointing the url to another domain of mine and the bounce rate improved to an absolutely awful 98.1%.
I held it for three years. The traffic shot up over the last three years, but the bounce rate remained constant. So I sold it for pocket money - $4k.
This issue of typos has ramifications if you want to get involved in the moral issues.
1. I know for a fact that the website knew of the domain and could have taken it off me in a second. But being a top ten website, they really didn't care about a proverbial drop in the ocean of lost traffic.
2. It is really not like they are "losing" the traffic. Once the person gets to the right destination they will bookmark it if it is somewhere they will want to come back to. And even if they dont bookmark it, once they realize they tapped in a typo, they will retype it correctly
3. If typos have questionable morals, what about new extensions that come out and domainers buy names that they know are generic and make the huge companies buy the names off the holders of the major extensions
4.The approval of the .CO cctld for Columbia is like a kid in a candy store for typo domainers. Surely, if the "industry" really had a problem with typos believeing the owners to be paraiahs, then they could have made a special exception with .CO and swapped it around with .OC or any combination available short of .CO which will become the wildwest extension. No one seems to be complaining.
The typo I owned was and is the only typo I have ever held and I do not feel like I need to go to confession. IMO
