I spent $35,000 on a “typo domain” 8 months ago. Is it a good investment? | Hacker News Reader

I spent $35,000 on a “typo domain” 8 months ago. Is it a good investment?

testimonial.to

46 pointsdamechen16 comments

I hate to admit that I spent an absurd amount of time (around 6-7 minutes) trying to figure out the typo of the word "testimonial" before reading the article.

The typo isn't a typo rather than a wrong/another TLD. OP's website used ".to" TLD and they bought an ".io" TLD.

He also bought testimonials.to

The plural version of his product name.

Congrats to him! Just playing devil's advocate: what we see here is correlation, not necessarily causation. In other words, we don't know how many visitors who visited the domain with the typo would have realized quickly and then used Google and convert either way.

Yeah, but if I were a competitor, I could have taken those visitors to my website and he would have lost all of that traffic.

Exactly. Almost nobody types domains these days and mixed Search/URL bars execute search often anyway, w/o direct navigation. So the customers must have been referrals, who were particularly looking for this product and would have found it via another route anyway. 35k is a ridiculous amount to spend on this .io domain. The seller knew it too.

Well, _we_ don't know but author does. Assuming his business was already growing; If the combined increase of converts are the same, then yeah, the investment didn't pay off, but if his growth was $40.000 above expected growth, then I'd say it did work.

The only problem with paying $35k for a domain is that you're supporting domain squatters, and giving them seed money to squat more domains. I don't think I'd want to do that, but it's not my money.

Some domain registries sell "desirable" domains for higher prices directly. Not sure that is better but at least the money goes to the people actually running the infrastructure.

A controversial $35k spending also gives you a good ad spot on HN. Well done sir.

Brilliantly, they're probably profiting further from this analysis of their "typo domain" investment.

35k for io domain seems very expensive.

Very surprising that it got that much type in traffic.

I could see it being worth it for .com (famously bodybuilding.com cost 35k a long long time ago)

Why would people be going to .io instead of say .info, .biz, .dev, .business , .photo, .org, etc?

When was the last time you typed in non .com, org, .net domain by hand?

Just a quick question on your traffic / conversion stats.

How come you have (almost) as many conversions as you have leads?

How do you count these?

I guess there is no way of estimating how much revenue was actually lost on people who typed in the wrong url and then didn't try again?

Without that piece of data I'm not sure if one can claim that there was a return on this investment - my assumption being that motivated buyers would still try to find the correct url.

The thing that would be better to know but impossible to tell is - how much was unable to be recouped as a result of picking a boutique TLD for the main site in the first place. Good to know at least some is recoverable though, assuming you hit enough volume.

TLDR: yes, people miss spell names.

I heard once that even the names of spells have power so a little care fulness is sometimes warranted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com