Gamil.com: how a typo can destroy your business

    Typo domains are one of the favorite of domain parking specialists. Direct traffic volume of typo domains is stable or increases in time and they can earn some pocket money. I am talking about popular word typos and not trademarks, since the latter one is not a really straightforward business and can cause more problems than benefits.

    Gamil.com was registered back in 1998 in good faith by Gamil Design Ltd. Today everyone would recognize the domain as a Gmail typo but not that time when Google was not such a dominant player in the email business. Although gmail.com was registered in 1995 (not by Google), it became the email portal of the search giant 9 years later, in 2004.

    This surely changed things at the small design company, since gamil.com got more and more visitors who tried to read their emails and had no plans to hire a product designer. Since this is maybe the best typo for one of the most directly visited websites, accidental visitors suddenly grew to an incredible amount. Just one year later, there were 20,000 average daily visitors on gamil.com, maybe 99.9% interested in email.

    One would really hope this amount of visitors on his website but not for this price. If no one of your visitors are interested in your service, still you need high-end servers to maintain this traffic volume, that is not that funny. You have no chance to monetize the typo traffic, since it is trademarked, so it is a real trap. Currently, the website shows just an error page so it seems that the owners gave it up. Alexa rank is still 45,000 and considering that there is no chance to visit more pages or spend time on the site, it can easily mean that there are over 1 million visitors a month on a site without content.

    This is how an innocent giant can cannibalize an innocent small company. You are one of those who are responsible for the fall of Gamil.com: Why don’t bookmark gmail.com or follow the url recommendation?