Mike stumbled upon a very interesting use of a typo domain in the .UK extension. If you go to ebay.c.uk like Mike did, or any domain where you leave off the o in .co.uk, you get a page that explains that the company behind the domain is Claims.co.uk. The company has apparently done a lot of work helping charities and they are also owners of C.co.uk and the matching C.uk.
So what the company is doing is using a wildcard on any typos and bringing users to this landing page, the page explains who they are and what plans they have for utilizing C.uk.
They get a fair amount of traffic, from the landing page:
How many people do this?
Quite a lot actually! We get over 100,000 unique individuals a month visiting our site. This adds up quite quickly, as each year we have about 1.37 million people visiting us, or to put it better 2.1% of the entire UK population. That’s enough to fill Old Trafford over 18 times!
It is nice to see they are focused on a charitable mission, with 100,000 visits a month they can probably make some kind of a difference.
Best of luck
Cool story
Hello Raimond, the guy behind this is noneless than John Quial who has already in the past been featured at DnJournal.com via his Claims.co.uk business.. he has several unique projects running related to domains, besides this one..
see also here: http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2013/september-october.htm
The same should apply to o.uk etc
After reading the article the first thing I did was look at Google keyword tool for typos of the top .co.uk sites, both o.co.uk and c.co.uk.
In every instance O performs at least as well as C and in about 30% of typos performs about 25% better, rough numbers.
So yeah, you are right.
Any word applies with the typo: .C.UK forwards you to http://www.c.uk