Ten Simple Typos With Surprisingly Huge Costs

Most people view a typographical error as no big deal. With all of the typing the average person does today, some on very tiny keyboards and affected by autocorrect, we're used to ignoring typos. Yet there are cases in which even a single typo is a huge problem. Or conversely, as in the case of Google, it could make an already successful corporation a ridiculous amount of money per year:

"Back in 2010, research carried out by Harvard University revealed that typographical errors in website addresses were netting Google about $497 million per year. The researchers estimated that roughly 0.7 percent of attempts to visit a site ended up with users accidentally visiting a different site with a similar name. For instance, Google’s smartest and most charismatic users might want to visit Listverse.com, but end up visiting Listvers.com instead. These “typographical error” sites (often called typosquatting sites) receive up to 68.2 million page views every single day. And about 57 percent of such sites are used to host advertisements, many of them sourced through Google.

While Google has a policy of removing their ads from such sites, they’re still flourishing. In fact, if all the typosquatting sites were a single website, it would be the 10th most visited website in the world."

Not all corporate typos are moneymakers. Read about some companies that lost millions or were put out of business by a few errant keystrokes in this article.