A wave of Web profits in guiding lost surfers

September 16th, 2003
By International Herald Tribune

Type in an Internet query, and inadvertently leave off the dot in .com, .net or .org. Or try to find, say, Target's Web site, but mistakenly tap www.arget.com in the browser.

Everybody makes such mistakes. In fact, so many people mistype or misspell Web queries that some technology companies are trying to turn the lapses into profits.

VeriSign, the largest U.S. registrar of Web addresses ending in .com and .net, was set to jump into the fray Monday by introducing a Web navigation service that whisks typo traffic to its Site Finder, which will try to put users back on the right track.

In doing so, it hopes to generate pay-per-click revenue from commercial Web sites that Site Finder would steer their way.

In May, NeuStar, which administers Web addresses ending in .biz and .us, did its own trial.

Such a business plan may not sit well with operators of big search engines like America Online and Microsoft's MSN, because it would threaten to cut off traffic before it has a chance to arrive. Some regulators say they question whether companies like VeriSign, whose job it is to referee the legitimate use of Web addresses, should be potentially profiting from misaddressed Web queries.

"It's a clever idea to monetarize somebody's typos, but not by the registries," said Vinton Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet and a member of its regulatory oversight body, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. Cerf said he worried that traffic diversion could cause chaos.

This month, federal authorities charged a Florida man, John Zuccarini, with violating a new law making it illegal to use misleading Internet domain names to entice minors to pornographic Web sites. He is accused of registering 3,000 Web address names with misspellings or variations of names of popular children's attractions.

A mistake or typo would direct the user to Zuccarini's Web pages, which have X-rated advertising. Zuccarini has generated as much as $1 million a year, said Eric Wenger of the Consumer Protection Bureau of the Federal Trade Commission.

But VeriSign executives say they plan a legitimate, useful service.

Testing found that 20 million users daily failed to connect to the site they sought; instead they received the error message, "The page cannot be displayed."

After testing its service over several months with more than two dozen companies, VeriSign, which oversees the assignment and administration of 27 million Web addresses, or domain names, is rolling it out live on the Internet. Instead of receiving an error message, or being sent to a search engine, the user's befuddled query would be sent to Site Finder, which offers options to try the query again, choose among other possibly relevant sites or go to categories linked to commercial Web sites.

While VeriSign declined to say more than that it expected "to make millions based on paid clicks," some clues to how much the mistake traffic is worth come from one of its partners. Overture Services, a provider of Web search services in which Web site operators pay for the traffic sent their way, said that last quarter the average amount received for each visitor was 40 cents. The company, which reported revenue of nearly $1 billion last year, agreed in July to be acquired by Yahoo for $1.7 billion.

Mark Lewyn, a founder of Paxfire, which has developed mistake-capturing technology, said that even a small percentage of the error-prone users clicking on a page's paid links could generate a considerable amount of money.

"The whole key to this is to shower the Web site with traffic," said Lewyn, who worked with NeuStar in its trial. "The more traffic, the more money. It's a very simple equation."

Lewyn said Paxfire was aiming at Web address registrars as potential customers because their primary source of revenue - selling domain names - is dwindling and because, in their role as Internet traffic cops, they have first say in how users are directed.

Web heavyweights like America Online and MSN are looking warily at VeriSign's experiment.

"We are watching to see what VeriSign is doing," the MSN product manager, Karen Redetzki, said. "It's because we want to understand what is happening, but it is not significant to our business."

She declined to say how much MSN's mistake traffic is worth.

An AOL spokesman, Andrew Weinstein, said the company had modified its service to eliminate the basic error message because "it was confusing to consumers."

Nevertheless, he said, America Online would oppose registries' diversion of mistake traffic on grounds that it interferes with its relationship with its users.