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

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 &quot;testimonial&quot; before reading the article.<p>The typo isn&#x27;t a typo rather than a wrong&#x2F;another TLD. OP&#x27;s website used &quot;.to&quot; TLD and they bought an &quot;.io&quot; TLD.

Congrats to him! Just playing devil&#x27;s advocate: what we see here is correlation, not necessarily causation. In other words, we don&#x27;t know how many visitors who visited the domain with the typo would have realized quickly and then used Google and convert either way.

The only problem with paying $35k for a domain is that you&#x27;re supporting domain squatters, and giving them seed money to squat more domains. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d want to do that, but it&#x27;s not my money.

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

Brilliantly, they&#x27;re probably profiting further from this analysis of their &quot;typo domain&quot; investment.

35k for io domain seems very expensive.<p>Very surprising that it got that much type in traffic.<p>I could see it being worth it for .com (famously bodybuilding.com cost 35k a long long time ago)<p>Why would people be going to .io instead of say .info, .biz, .dev, .business , .photo, .org, etc?<p>When was the last time you typed in non .com, org, .net domain by hand?

Just a quick question on your traffic &#x2F; conversion stats.<p>How come you have (almost) as many conversions as you have leads?<p>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&#x27;t try again?<p>Without that piece of data I&#x27;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.