Most people regard typos as nuisances, just inconsequential mistakes that cause them to lose a second of time hitting the backspace key.  But for Google, typos may equal big business, as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that they make the search giant $497 million per year.

Edelman and Moore, who both call Harvard their home, coauthored a paper titled "Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders."  In a blog post summarizing it, they presented several sets of statistics and wrote, "According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads."

Then they made a rather more interesting comment regarding the effect of Google’s connection: "Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year."

Also, Google’s pretty much the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

Now, it’s necessary to mention that Edelman is involved in a lawsuit against Google ("arising out of Google’s use of typosquatting domains to display advertising"), so he may not be the least biased person in the world.  The numbers he and Moore presented are still stunning if true.

UPDATE: Ben Edelman was good enough to drop by in the comments section, and he wrote,  "Surely it’s not Google’s fault that some people misspell. But our study [shows] that typosquatters register more domains targeting companies in sectors with high PPC prices. That tells us that PPC funding is *causing* and *exacerbating* typosquatting. Without PPC payments, there would be fewer typosquatting registrations — much less reason for squatters to register these domains. Google’s payments put the system in motion; squatters register domains exactly in anticipation of getting paid by Google. Google knows where it’s showing ads. (Example: Google shows Expedia ads if you misspell Expedia, but Travelocity ads if you misspell Travelocity!) So it’s natural to look to Google for resolution of these problems." 

>> Click to read the rest of Edelman’s comment …

American startups are not alone when it comes to the well of venture funding drying up. A recent report by the Israel Venture Capital Research Center has found that funding in Israel fell drastically to $1.12 billion in 2009, nearly half the amount from the previous year. The 46% decrease marks the lowest funding numbers since 2003 and ends Israel’s streak of three consecutive years with increasing number of companies and funding dollars.

The numbers are a sign of the worldwide economic stress that is affecting countries large and small across the globe. While funding plummeted between 2008 and 2009, the number of companies funded only fell roughly 7% from 483 to 447, which means less money is being given to each company. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the average financing round was just $2.2 million, down from $3.61 million during the same period in 2008.

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By sector, life sciences saw the most growth took the lion’s share of the money up from 15% in 2008 to 24% in 2009. Semiconductors in Israel continued a downward trend, falling from 15% of the funding in 2008 to just 8% in 2009, its lowest share since 2001. The internet and communications sectors held steady at 13% and 20% respectively, but they are nowhere near their numbers from 2000 when they combined for almost 70% of the total funding.

As reflected in the report, Israeli venture firms tend to favor mid-stage funding over seed funding by a great margin. In the fourth quarter of 2009, mid-stage companies accounted for over half of the funding, while seed companies gained just 4% of the total.

We recently reported that the fourth quarter showed hope for American startups, both in mergers and acquisitions and venture funding. For comparison, the United States saw over $20 billion in venture funding for 2461 deals in 2009, an average of nearly $8.5 million per deal.

With venture funding seemingly drying up in Israel, the United States could see an influx of foreign entrepreneurs coming to American for venture funds. Of course, this could be expedited by the creation of a startup visa program, a topic we wrote about earlier this month.

Photo by Flickr user .

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We’re excited to announce that our latest premium research report will be available for download on Monday! Titled The Real-Time Web and Its Future, the report is a broad and deep look at the emerging world of real-time technology on the web. Based on 50 interviews with companies, engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time technology – the subtitle of this report could very well be “Real-Time, Beyond Twitter and Facebook.”

Social networks, infrastructure providers, media companies, non-profits and financial services companies were all interviewed and will all find this report useful to quickly develop a sophisticated understanding of this important trend on the web. Large portions of the web will be operating in real-time and this report will provide you with an important competitive advantage. You can pre-order the report at a $100 discount here; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF) below.

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There is so much work being done around push delivery of messages – messages between people, between websites and people and between machines and machines – that it’s impossible to capture the whole market.

What we’ve done is develop in-depth case studies of 10 companies that are illustrative of general trends or have wildly innovative strategies. We’ve profiled twenty four key people to watch in order to understand the future of real time. We’ve done overviews of three of the biggest sectors in this market – search, stream readers and filtering/text analysis. And we offer five visualizations to help you understand the issues and strategies.

This report captures the wisdom of thousands of hours of work with real-time technology by people breaking new ground – then it was distilled down through hundreds of hours of interviews, research and writing by ReadWriteWeb staff and hundreds of Real-Time Summit attendee conversations. Now you can purchase the report and get an in-depth understanding of this emerging trend in just a few hours of reading and for a bargain price of $200 by pre-order, or $300 next week.

Pre-order today and you’ll receive a link to download the 60+ page PDF on Monday, November 30th.

For your perusing pleasure we offer today the Table of Contents and one full sample chapter for download. Or, check out this excerpt from that sample chapter below.

Ted Roden Brings the Real-Time Web to the NY Times and EnjoysThings

By day, Ted Roden works at the very top floor of the New York Times building, in the R&D department. The Times has a great team of engineers; they do cutting edge work in APIs, data visualization and computer assisted reporting. Roden does work with real-time data at his day job, but he gets full creative freedom when working a side-project called EnjoysThings.

The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating:

• the material benefits of going real time
• the importance of user experience
• the changing landscape in analytics and advertising

We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure.

EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site’s developments and the service is a lot of fun to use.

This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content.

One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content
shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That’s remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive.

The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the
browser as soon as it’s shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he’s using the open source infrastructure Tornado, from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times.

EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could
likely be incurred by sites of any size.

1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE

“People leave it open all day long,” Roden said of the sidebar. “Time-on-site has seen a
huge increase. It’s like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it’s about to pop in 5 seconds you’ll stick around.”

There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly
important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video
is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly
common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is.

2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS

After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that “my site runs a lot more
smoothly, I’ll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it’s
much easier on the database for me.”

“I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I’ve reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down.” Roden’s experience compliments the story that Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth.

…(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download above. Please see also the Table of Contents and pre-order now to get a great discount on the forthcoming report!

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YouTube has just launched a new engagement product for YouTube Brand Channels called the YouTube Mosaic. What it does is present an image covering nearly the entire screen of a channel, and it is made up of colors and shapes from a bunch of individual videos.

"The idea is that users no longer just browse on a company’s channel, but they can also actively experience the brand in new and exciting ways, which could lead them to identify more strongly with it," Victoria Katsarou of YouTube Communications tells WebProNews.

Volkswagen is already utilizing the Mosaic on its channel. The company is just part of a growing number of advertisers from various sectors who are employing gadget on their channels to more effectively engage their audiences, Katsarou says.

"Volkswagen always pursues innovation in communication. Because of that,  social media is an important part of our brand communication strategy –we are using innovative tools and are the first to try out new formats," says Ralf Maltzen, Head of CRM and Internet Marketing at Volkswagen AG.

"As we expand creative possibilities for brand Channels, advertisers their have the option to create their own gadgets or use pre-made gadgets by YouTube, such as the popular Contest Module  or the eye-catching Mosaic," Katsarou adds.

To take advantage of the Mosaic, advertisers need only provide YouTube with an 840×411 .jpg, .png. or .gif image file, and the video information of all the videos they want to include. YouTube then creates the mosaic automatically. The channel must have a minimum of 25 videos in order for it to work. The Mosaic matches the shape and color of each thumbnail to the pixels of the target image. Videos can be:

- belonging to the brand
- related to the brand (permission from content owner required)
- submitted to a contest

When users scroll over thumbnails, they are enlarged to show the details of the video (name, length, rating). Once clicked, the user can watch video within the gadget, and scroll through videos while remaining on the channel.

The mosaic provides an interesting way to get users to explore the videos in a brand channel. YouTube maintains that it also encourages users to explore all your videos, spending more time with your brand.

The Mosaic feature is currently only available to advertisers. There are currently no plans to extend the feature for availability to all channels.