MarkMonitor.com: There Are 450,000 CyberSquatting Sites
2009 March 9
According to MarkMonitor, there were almost 450,000 cyber-squatting sites active at the end of 2008 an increase of 18%.
MarkMonitor.com now has a new term for these types of sites, brandjacking.
Further findings from Markmonitor.com
Abuse of apparel brands rose fastest in 2008, growing by 28 percent. High-tech and automotive brand abuse grew the second fastest, at 21 percent each, food and beverage and media brand abuse growing at 17 percent and 11 percent, respectively.
About 70 percent of sites illegally using domain names in their Web page titles were in the .com domain, with about 30 percent in the country-code domains.
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MarkMonitor is a service business that benefits from hype around trademark infringement on the web.
It sounds “outrageous” but what exactly is “domain names in their web page titles”? That’s a meaningless stat that sounds impressive in the context of marketing hype favoring MarketMonitor. They probably count it with their automated crawler, which is blocked by many publishers (especially more aggressive marketers) and which would, coincidentally, count any blog post of yours that mentions a brand domain in the post title as an infringement (since your WordPress uses post titles as page titles).
I also note the reference to SEO is baseless…