As you know most the single charter .com are reserved by the registry and do not or have ever resolved.
However that doesn’t stop a lot of people from typing in those address into their broswer every month.
Take for example e.com.
According to Compete.com 55K people a month visit the non-existant domain. Alexa ranks the site as 111,000 on the net.
F.com is not far behind with 33,000 visitors a month estimated by Compete and an Alexa ranking of 175,000.
12,000 people visit 1.com a month and 18,000 check out 5.com.
If you take into account all of the reserved single character .com’s hundreds of thousands of people type these into their browser a month, although no site has ever existed under them.
How do we know all of the traffic is type in?
They are not ranked by the search engines and have never been in use and have no links of any kind.
If you want to prove there is a huge amount of natural type in traffic coming in on great domains look no further than to check out the traffic on the domains that don’t exist.
How many of the visitors are from mistypes?
I realize we don’t know.
But, could someone be trying to reach
e?,com , ?e,com, F?,com or ?F,com
For example, FT is a very popular site.
Same thing applies to 1?,com or ?1,com 5?,com ?5,com
As we get older, perfect vision is second to go.
Also, with the popularity of smartphones with the small screens,
it is easy to mistype.
Mike, interesting data.
Senior
We have no idea how much of this traffic was meant for other sites, however it is indisputably proof that people do in fact type in domain to their browser still.
A lot of these have backlinks.
e.com did resolve in 1999-2000 or thereabout. I don’t remember if it was Sun or IBM that was using it for marketing campaign, but it was used on loan from the registry and I think it was just used as a redirect. There are still some back links floating around if you dig, many of them are typos of google such as googl.e.com.
Other single letters that have been used:
q.com was used by Qwest for several years until the registry took it back in 2007.
x.com was the first online bank, and merged with Paypal. Paypal retained the x.com domain until 2008 when it was taken back.
z.com was originally registered by an individual in 1994. Nissan acquired it in 1999 (I believe the terms of the deal were 3 cars: 2 current production models and a 350z when it was released) when they announced the relaunch of the Z series in preparation for the 350Z that was released in 2002. The registry took it back in 2008.
The registry hasn’t taken any of those single letter .coms back. I don’t think there was ever an e.com either.
X.com and Q.com are still resolving..
What is the logic by never having released the names? How does that serve anyone?
there never was an “e.com” and the Registry has not taken any of them back either.
x.com is still owned by PayPal, Q.com by Quest, and z.com by Nissan.
Thing is, none of these companies can sell one of these domains without selling the entire holding company with it.
This tells me that at least 55,000 people per month are new to domaining 🙂 which should in itself be a good thing! Multiply by the letters of the alphabet and digits – and there may be millions per year showing an interest. Maybe not great for PPC, but.. in the end, end users are hoping for a score. That they are seeking quality short domains means they un-der-stand – Thanks MHB.
its all formed by several ****E.com typos
They are all working q x and z x.com is a paypal.com project.
I.net too, it is owned by domainer fma.com.
Wow… Amazing valuable information….. Love type-in visitor…..
i.net demonstrates my point above, that the original entity is the only allowed registrant.
…also how I know about this 😉
great info. might i also point out that in most cases ISPs are monetizing this traffic to non-existent domains in the same way as parked domains, with PPC landing pages. so on the face of it according to your previous post on the WSJ article/Microsoft lawsuit, that Microsoft would consider the practices of many ISPs as ‘shady’
“Microsoft would consider the practices of many ISPs as ’shady’ ”
Bullies do not pick fights with someone that might beat them.
I use comcast. If I mistype Comcast, displays their own ppc page.
Going after Comcast becomes complicated now that they are the new owners of NBC/Universal Studios. And, there is a news relationship with MS called MSNBC.
I’m sure in the future if someone mistypes with Internet Explorer you will be FORCED to land on a Bing ppc page.
there is one more “registered” (but I think non-resolving) .net, and one other L.org, that being the domain name http://www.X.org. “The X.org Foundation” own it. BTW speaking of .e.com etc, I think this one probably gets typos from se.x.org or maybe also s.e.x.org just like s.e.x.com would for Paypal’s X.com.
Alexa? Unless everyone has the Alexa toolbar, how can they tell? Those numbers are meaningless.
Mike we are well aware that Alexa is not an exact tool, but this is an estimate based on the number of *alexa users* that type in those addresses.
So have seen the following as *registered* domain names (seems all 1-letter.biz names are registered as far as I can tell, but not all resolve)
http://www.q.com – Quest
http://www.x.com – PayPal
http://www.z.com – Nissan
http://www.i.net – Future Media Architects, Inc. / Inet Corp.
http://www.q.net – Private Registration
http://www.x.org – X.Org Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain
Interesting that Q.com and Q.net as well as X.com and X.org are among the 6 – 1 letter .com net and org domain names still registered…
“On December 1, 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved the remaining single-letter and single-digit domain names. The few domains that were already assigned were grandfathered in and continued to exist.”