Google May Make $500 Million a Year on Typos

According to a recent analysis by a team of Harvard researchers, Google may make as many as $500 million each year on typos.

The reason for this: many of the “typosquatting” domain names that get most or all of their traffic from people incorrectly typing the names of the places they want to go — for instance, as we discovered yesterday, “stackiverflow.com” for programmer nexus “stackoverflow.com” — use ads from Google’s ad network. And whenever they do, Google gets a piece of the profit as well. Individually, typosquatting domains might not make a lot of money, but as the middleman, Google’s profits could seriously add up, the researchers theorize: