Is it unethical to take advantage of a competitor's mistake?

ROFL - That has got to hurt the other guy. How long before he realizes that he is getting all these click throughs on the ad but is not making any sales? I am sure he would check the ad to see he had it right and will notice his misspelled URL.

Please let us know how long you get free traffic from his typo. I want to see how long this poor schlep takes to figure out his mistake. lol

Hm, just curious - how do you actually find out if a URL is mis-spoken on TV? Do you check every URL you see on TV?

If you do, you really have an interesting habit.

If you do check every URL shown on TV, could you share with us the "mis-spoken conversion rate" haha? If it's one in a 100, boy, I'd hire someone to watch TV all day..



Take care,

~Davor

I was actually going to do that first, but his original url had a private whois - so, oh well. At least I tried.

I'd hate the fact that I made the mistake and would hope that someone would email me and let me know. And that's what I tried to do in the beginning, however the original url had no contact information, and the registration info in the whois was private.

That's money just being thrown out the window in my opinion. I'm just providing the bucket to catch it with. If that makes me scummy, then bring on the scum

That is awsome. Again second time I have said this tonight, way to think out side of the box. You always have to keep your eyes open for those great opportunities out there. They are out there you just have to look. And Congrats on the find, definitely not unethical just business.


Kick my self for not double checking my spelling. If I was stupid enough to make this mistake I would say thats what I get and the money lost is my punishment. This is not scummy at all again, just business.

Are you kidding, of course its not unethical (or scummy)

Serves him right for making such a stupid mistake, Gary already said he tried to warn him

Kim

No matter how you spin it, you are stealing his traffic. The fact that the traffic was going nowhere doesn't give you some kind of license to swipe it. Is that really how you want to conduct your business?

If you have done everything you can to contact the person, I think it's perfectly ethical.

No sense in that traffic just going to waste.

Interesting idea....

Now, just how many hours before some clown creates the "Mistyped Url Ad Finder" software which is a spider that scans pages for mistyped URLS that aren't registered and reports back to you so you can scoop up the traffic.

I did email an adwords rep about it. But I doubt that they will take action. Otherwise all adwords users would start emailing Google claiming "mispelled url" on their competition.

Awesome. No JV (though I'd imagine that's still possible), no coffee... but definitely a lot of good Karma.

Cheers,
Becky

Actually, I like that story much better than my own. If I had known this person I might have considered doing that. However, I had no way of contacting this person. R Hagel - above says that I may have been able to contact them through the private whois email address, but I did not know that at the time.

That is a great story though, I would have gladly given you at least a split of my earnings.

Speak for yourself, because quite frankly I consider it theft.

The publisher is paying for that traffic. You are getting that traffic for free. I have no qualms about taking advantage of a competitor's mistakes so long as I spend my own dime doing it.

Yeah, you can argue he spent his own money on the domain name. However, that's like saying, you see a tractor trailer driving down the road. The driver fcrgot to lock the trailer up. a pallet of merchandise falls out. You have a friend wait there while you go rent a U-Haul.

It's yours though, because you spent the money on the U-Haul, right?

All moral/ethical points aside, when I run an Adwords campaign and my QS drops my CPC rises and that given keyword is disabled by Google until I raise my bid, and/or raise my quality score.

To contend that a dead page would keep costing your competitor money doesn't make much sense to me.

It is clear to me that if you create a page where the QS is sufficient your competitor will keep spending his ad budget, and this will be a direct result of your intervention.

There's no free water hitting the ground here.

KJ

To everyone that is calling this stealing or unethical or just plain wrong:

I have a question for you. You find a competitor has made his entire sales page out of different sections of flash and that they have no real text on their page at all. They are getting a PR of 8.

Do you go to them and tell them what their mistake is? No, you don't. Instead you do a better job on your sales page so you get a rank of 3 or 2 instead. Therefore, by your own logic, you are unethical and stealing and scumbags and every other mean thing you call the OP. You are monopolizing on the mistakes of your competition. That is exactly what he did, what Toyota does, what Nintendo does and every other company in the free world does.

It is called good business. Now, unless you are telling your competition about all the mistakes they have with their copy and sales pages, you are no better than the OP. Plain and simple.

Now, start telling the truth and shaming the devil, the only reason you are saying it is unethical and whatnot is because you did not think of it first. Well, neither did I but you don't see me pissing in his post toasties. I salute the man for catching the opening and moving in for the interception just like on Monday Night Football on ABC.

Oh, I guess the LBs in Football are unethical when they intercept the pass, or in soccer when one takes the ball away from the opponents player, or when the runner steals second on a wild pitch and the list goes on and on and on.

That's actually a good argument - someone else also said that above. However the business being conducted by this url, is measured in conversions. So they would be conducting their business based on ROI (return on investment) Therefore they'd stop their campaign at the same spending point either way. They may have just hit their spending point a little faster if their quality score went down. Either way their spending will end up being the same - at least this way they can find out without having to build their quality score back up. I may actually be saving them some money.

Sorry, not a comparable scenario. Checks can be returned. Traffic can not.

A more comparable scenario would be - What if the postman incorrectly delivered a bag of cash to your address and said that it was set to burst into flames and burn to ashes if no one claimed it immediately. Would you claim it?

Autoschediastic, that's what you have done, you saw the opportunity of making something out of wasted traffic with the first intent of contacting the owner of the misspelled site and being unable to contact it you decided to just cash in. Nothing wrong with that, it is like if you find a hundred dollars bill, what would you do? keep it if you don't know who it belongs to, I'm sure that if you knew who owns that site you will let them know about it, I have seen errors on web pages like broken links or some like that and was able to contact the owner and get him to correct the problem, a couple of them actually have a link to my site since I contacted them on good faith, so what you have done it's not unethical in any manner, not at all, keep it up.