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Facebok.com had 250 million hits a year

Kevin Murphy, June 22, 2011, 02:18:28 (UTC), Domain Policy

The typo domain name facebok.com was receiving an estimated 250 million visits per year, according to a Facebook attorney.
As I’ve previously reported, the domain was subject to controversy after Facebook won it in a UDRP adjudication and was subsequently sued by the cybersquatter.
“Obviously, it’s Facebook except lacking one O, and attracting a lot of traffic – 250 million was the estimate by our SEO team, 250 million hits a year,” Facebook’s Susan Kawaguchi said during a panel on UDRP here at the ICANN meeting in Singapore.
“Somebody was making a lot of money off of it,” she said.
Facebok.com bounced users to what Kawaguchi described as a “social survey scam” – a site that used Facebook’s look-and-feel to get users to sign up for expensive text message services.
After Facebook won the UDRP in September, a bogus Panama-based shell company sued Facebook and the registrar, EuroDNS, claiming to be the true owner of the domain.
The suit persuaded EuroDNS to put the transfer to Facebook on hold, and ICANN threatened to terminate the registrar’s accreditation as a result.
The situation has since been resolved, and Facebook owns the domain, but EuroDNS may find itself in trouble with the Luxembourg court.

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Comments (6)

  1. todaro says:

    the notion that any mistype would get a million hits a day is so bizarre as to be beyond normal comprehension.

  2. […] Facebok.com had 250 million hits a year Posted by Jag  Published in Domaining.com Facebok.com had 250 million hits a year […]

  3. z says:

    Todaro…
    250m hits over 1 year. 1 year = 365 days.
    250m hits over 365 days doesn’t equal 1m hits per day.

  4. NA says:

    Yeah those social offers have got the potential to get a lot of domains taken via UDRP and even longer more harmful potential. The FTC and FCC is pretty well known for coming after companies in the mobile space with those types of offers.

  5. […] attorney said last year that typos of high-traffic sites, such as facebok.com, could expect to get 250 million visits a year. Related posts (automatically generated):Typosquatting is huge but not dangerous, study […]

  6. Tom says:

    Still an incredibly valid point after over 2 years…misspellings of companies brands and domains cost them money.

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