The California based internet security company McAfee released foundings of a survey on typo domains called "The State of Typo-Squatting 2007".
 
For a better understanding, especially if you do not know what Cyberspautting and Typosquatting is, read the Jabz™ articles Cybersquatting Explained and Typosquatting Explained in the internet marketing encyclopedia.
 
For their Typo-Squatting 2007 analysis, McAfee took a closer look on 1.9 million typographical variations of 2,771 of the most popular websites. McAfee found 127,381 suspected typo-squatters.
 
Methodology Of The Typo-Squatting 2007 Analysis
 
First, McAfee collected a list of sites based on the most popular and common sites visited by typical consumers.  A total of 2,771 target sites were collected from a variety of different sources, including:

• Hitwise
• Yahoo! Buzz
• Nielsen
• Billboard
• Google Zeitgeist
• McAfee’s own site popularity data
• Suggestions from McAfee’s world wide staff

Then, McAfee generated permutations (different misspellings) of each of the 2,771 target domains.   Among the eight methods we used to generate permutations were:

• Swapped Characters – Swap characters one at a time. Example: yuotube.com.
• Replaced Characters – Replace characters one at a time. Example: wschovia.com.
• Inserted Characters – Insert one character. Example: Newgroounds.com.
• Deleted Character – Remove one character at a time. Example: cartonnetwork.com.
• Missing dot – Remove the dot between the “www” and the domain. Example: wwwmicrosoft.com.

We typically generated 500+ permutations for a 5-letter domain and 800+ permutations for a 10-letter domain.

Next, we surfed to each of these 1,920,256 permutations. If the permutation resolved to a live Web site within a certain amount of time, we marked the site as “live” and then tested the site’s content for the presence of a parking company signature – short pieces of text (often, URLs) that indicate a site is hosted by a well known parking company that serves pay per click advertising.

For some categories, we used our judgment to select the target domain. For example, in the celebrity category, we used firstnamelastname.com as a proxy for the celebrity’s official Web site. In some cases (e.g. parishilton.com) the proxy and official site are one in the same. In other cases (e.g. tomcruise.com) the actual site does not currently serve content. We used this method to simulate what we believe to be a typical consumer's effort to directly navigate to the celebrity’s home page.
 
Typo-Squatting Survey Findings
 
The most shocking fact out of this finding is that the typo sites outnumber the original sites by 45 to 1. But this is not all:

• Typo-squatting is very common and affects every segment of the Web. 7.2% of the possible typographical errors we studied were actively squatting. In other words, a typical consumer who misspells a popular Web site URL has a 1 in 14 chance of landing at a likely typo-squatter site.
• The five most highly squatted categories are game sites (14.0%), airlines (11.4%), main stream media company sites (10.8%), adult sites (10.2%) and technology and Web 2.0 related sites (9.6%).
• Children’s sites are highly targeted by typo squatters. The average for the category is 8.4% and 24 of the top most squatted sites are children’s properties for kids 12 and under. Add in sites like MySpace and Miniclip and more than 60 of the top most squatted sites are properties that appeal to the 18 and under demographic.
• Squatters follow consumer crowds. Popular, consumer-focused Web sites typically attract more squatters than business to business sites or niche content sites.
• The incidence of pornographic content on non-adult typo-squatted sites is just 2.4%, suggesting improvement since previous studies by other researchers.
• Automated ad syndication services like Google’s AdSense enable a significant minority of typo-squatter sites to generate revenue. Google-enabled advertising shows up on 19.3% of all suspected typo-squatter sites in this study. Yahoo-enabled advertising shows up on 4.4% of all suspected typo-squatter sites.
• The increasing use of automation to buy and sell vast numbers of domains, combined with a 5-day free trial (known as “tasting”) for new registrations to top level domains like dot-com appear to be two significant factors in the rapid growth of typo-squatting.
• At 3.4%, sites popular outside the U.S. are less than half as likely to be typo-squatted as overall sites.
• The five non-U.S. countries most likely to have popular sites squatted are the United Kingdom (7.7%), Portugal (6.5%), Spain (5.9%), France (5.4%), and Italy (4.1%).
• The five non-U.S. countries least likely to have popular sites squatted are the Netherlands (1.5%), Israel (1.1%), Denmark (1.0%), Brazil (0.9%) and Finland (0.1%).
• The top four parking companies, ranked by the percentage of squatters parked by them, are Oversee.net/Domainsponsor (31.4%), Hitfarm (11.3%), Sedo (2.5%) and GoDaddy (2.3%). Together, the top four park 47.5% of the squatters we discovered.

 
Possible Solutions And Actions
 
Although a fast solution for the problem is not in sight, a couple of companies are fighting against cybersquatting and typosquatting. If your trademark or brand suffers from cybersquatting, become an active member of  the CADNA, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse. If you are a domain broker who wants to show goodwill and a clean businessmodel, yu can join the Internet Commerce Association. Both organisations are fighting against cybersquatting.