A study released by Corporate Service Company (CSC), a brand protection company, looked at domains that start with “www” to see how much traffic those domains got in relation to the actual domain.
“””To understand how much traffic these domain variations could potentially drive, CSC analyzed the “wwwcscglobal.com” variation of the “cscglobal.com” domain name. The variation “wwwcscglobal.com” currently drives 1% of traffic to the main site.””
“”When the same logic is applied to a consumer brand with an average of one million Web site visitors per day, a 1% difference in traffic can make a substantial impact. By failing to register a common variation of its domain name, that consumer brand could be missing 3.65 million visitors per year. In fact, consumer Web sites may experience significantly higher traffic losses than a B2B site like www.cscglobal.com””
The study also looked at “global brands” domains starting with “www” and found that companies that own their “www” domain along to match their domain, hardly use the “www” verision.
The Study found that in the case of trademark holders who own “www” domains they don’t even resolve 67% of the time.
However when a third party owns the “www” version of the domain, it resolves 80% of the time, usually to a PPC page.
The point of the study was to determine which prefix and suffix was used most frequently to infringe on trademarks.
According to CSC the most common infringing Prefixes are domains that start with:
www
my
buy
e
the
According to CSC the most common suffixes used to infringe on a trademark are:
Online
USA
Store
Shop
com
An interesting read and you can check out further details here.
Remeber this is a “trademark protection” company which authored this study and what they consider to be protected terms, is much broader than what domainer’s would consider protected terms.
Rarer types are xom domains gets traffic but I forget the numbers. Like sexxom.com, people type in sex.com but often the “c” is mistyped as “x”.
I’ve found it’s more like 0.1%, not 1%, for domains where I own the “www” of one of my own domains.
Interesting. Any number of how much traffic goes to wwgoogle.com alike?
Brands
wwwgoogle.com goes to Google.com so only they know
wwwcandy.com
Just checked: economist.com is @ # 2,133 in Alexa’s global list. wwweconomist.com is only # 3,305,212. I doubt it that the latter is taking 1% of the traffic; at least in this case it is much less.
As to “ww”: what I meant, are there any other examples with “ww”-prefix instead of “www”?
To do an analysis properly, you have to count only real visitors, and not bots. Since cscglobal.com is a relatively low traffic site, the bots will be a big proportion of the visitors of the “www” typo. If one limited the analysis to big sites (Alexa top 25,000 sites, say), I’d stick with my 0.1% estimate as to how much the “www” typo receives relative to the proper domain name.
and “i” + something?
My
Guess it did not make the top 5
These companies are publishing nonsense numbers so they can lure more clients “Look how much you are losing” – so they can charge them thousands per domain UDRP.
This is very interesting to know. I wonder if this will provoke a mini land-rush on any domains with any appendages.
Nah. Prob’ly not.
“will provoke a mini land-rush”
true… the domains’ sellers will love very much this study… 🙂
.
The actual figure is 0.1% – 0.3%.
These figures are wrong, and I agree with D.
And it’s 0.1-0.3% only for comparing type-in traffic.
Most websites get a lot of back link and search engine traffic which is not included in my estimate. The real number is undoubtedly 0.1% and below comparing the actual site traffic to the type-in traffic of the missing dot.
In the .cm domain names, the missing o also generated about 1/1000th traffic of the .com domains according to my estimates and data. There are a few irregularities, but it’s definitely not 1/100.
Another way to look at it. If every missing letter, dot, or character would be 1% loss, then imagine a domain name like http://Www.WeightWatchers.com.
They’d lose about 22% of their visitors just from missing a character.
Not to mention garbled characters, and extra characters such as WEEIGHT or WEIGHHT. They’ be lose more than 100% of their traffif if this 1% data was correct HEHE. What a load of nonsense.
@Matt; thank goodness every missing dot, character, misspelling or other conceivable direct-nav difficulty doesn’t manifest. It would be interesting to examine the entire study.
BTW: Who commissioned this study? (I didn’t check the site listed above, yet)
Danny
A trademark group
CSCGlobal.com, which are basically lawyers that try to protect companies from TM infridgements like WeightWatchers.
So the report is already not valid because it’s commissioned by a non-neutral party. It’d be in their interest to pump up this figure. Two reasons:
1. They’ll get more news coverage (that’s already evident from this blog)
2. Companies that read this will see that their www typo is taken and most likely parked, and therefore will contact CSCGlobal for the service.
Actually, a load of lying crooks!
PS
To the person that posted about Alexa. Alexa is not always accurate. They are actually known for being inaccurate. But look at my example on Alexa: WeightWatchers.com is ranked 2853, and WWWWeightWatchers.com is ranked 8,718,231. That’s about 0.03%.