On Monday, I talked about "name clouds." A "name cloud" consists of all the names registered around your principal name. For example, once upon a time, if you were starting a new online business, you'd register a name in .COM as your principal name (the dark blue square) and depending on the location of your business, you might have picked up your ccTLD as well (the red square). If you wanted to ensure that no one used a similar name in commerce, you'd register your name in .NET, .ORG, .BIZ and .INFO as well (the yellow squares). Once upon a time, your name cloud might have looked like this:

But that's a very 2002-looking name cloud. Things have changed.

The next brand protection strategy that cropped up was to register your business name in all ccTLDs where you might possibly do business. Add Europe, the major Asian countries, Australia and New Zealand to your name cloud, and you might have a name cloud that starts to look like this, with the pink boxes representing the foreign ccTLDs: 

If you were a typical Bigco famous brand owner, your first introduction to typographical errors was when you picked up a handful of typos through the UDRP process. These were, more than likely, varients of your principal name in . COM. Add these typgraphical varients into the name cloud as light blue squares, and your cloud starts to look like this:

That's a fair representation of a typical Bigco name cloud, circa 2005.

As with everything it touches though, monetization and an expanding base of Internet users changes the game.  (If you're in the industry, as a domainer or a service provider, you know this already, but stay with me anyway, since I'm writing for a broader audience.)

In the post-monetization world, your name cloud looks more like this: 

See those empty boxes? Those are all commain typographical variants of your primary name in the .COM top-level domain. Just how far those empty boxes extend off the page is directly proportional to the fame and popularity of your website and the ability of the average user to misspell it.

If one of those empty box misspellings is very close to your brand name, you may decide to register it yourself, making your cloud look like this: 

But most of the empty boxes you decide not to register will be filled in by other people.

A few of the registrations may be phishers and fraudsters (black boxes)...but those black boxes are the exception not the rule.

Most of the typographical error registrations, however, will be registered to people using pay-per-click services (like Google AdSense), affiliate programs (like Linkshare) or monetized landing services (like Domain Sponsor or Sedo) to profit from the traffic these typos generate. These monetized registrations not registered to you are the grey boxes, which now make up the majority of the typical name cloud:

You can examine your own name cloud, in a different form, using Name Intelligence's Typo tool, which I covered on Monday.  

Convinced that all those grey boxes are a bad thing?

Come back Thursday for a review of how typographical names are affecting the small players and then Friday for "the prestige," when I show you why monetized typosquatting could be helping your business...and why, even if you disagree that those grey boxes are helpful, you need to start typosquatting yourself.

 

 

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