Misspelled and Expired Domain names that get a lot of traffic are becoming hot commodities. As evidenced by two recent transactions.

First, Marchex has agreed to pay 164.2 Million for Name Development Ltd., which displays keyword advertising across a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. With domains like careerinfo.com, debts.com, and hardware-update.com.

Name Development Ltd business model has been to buy expiring domains with existing traffic and point them to a parked page provider, like Domainhop and TrafficZ, who are willing to setup a site and pay them on a per-click basis. Companies like Name Development Ltd, use tools such as Popusearch and Mozzle to identify which of the expiring domains have a lot in sites linking to them.

Second, the misspelled domain voyuer.com was auctioned off for $112,100 at Snapnames during it's expiration period. The prior owner of Voyuer.com failed to renew the domain name from Network Solutions for $35, and Network Solutions sent the domain into the snapnames auction service to auction it off during the "grace period", the short amount of time after the customer's expiration date but before it was officially dropped by the Registry. In this process, SnapNames, Network Solutions, and the prior owner of the domain, share in the sales proceeds, with 15-20% of Network Solutions' unspecified portion of the sale going to the original registrant. So assuming that Snapnames shares 50%, the original registrant's percentage could be as high as 10% of the overall transaction, or $11,210 for the domain they didn't think was worth the $35 renewal fee. Not bad, but it might hurt a little knowing they could have sold it for the full $112,100. Of course, Network Solutions prominently spells this all out in schedule A section 14 service agreement that is subject to constant change and takes affect 30 days after posting the change to their site.

As more and more companies find ways to monetize "surfing traffic", expired domain names could be worth more and more. Additionally, creative affiliates should continue to explore possible domains with traffic that might drive sales to your merchant partners.

You can bid up a keyword term all day long, and Google makes more and more money, but a domain name that you purchase can be a long term asset for your company.