Brandjacking Costs Top Hotels $2B+ a Year: MarkMonitor
Majority of estimated “losses” are from keyword search engine bidding.
MarkMonitor just released a “Brandjacking” note (pdf) regarding online hotel bookings, estimating that sizable hotel brands lose over $2 billion a year in lost bookings and unnecessary commissions. The bulk of these losses are from competitors and travel agencies bidding on hotel brand names in search ads.
Also included in the note is a study of cybersquatting of 5 top hotel brands. MarkMonitor states it found 2,100 cybersquatted domain names of the five brands which collectively deliver over 57 million visits a year.
Much of this cybersquatting is from lesser-known competitors to these brands, not traditional PPC cybersquatters.
MarkMonitor is a brand protection firm, so you ought to read the note with a grain of salt. How the firm calculated the lost bookings and commissions isn’t detailed in the note, and you can rest assured that they were anything but conservative.
Consider one notorious example from brand advocacy group CADNA, which claimed that clicks from typos of sites such as Google and YouTube averaged $2.74 per click. CADNA stated its source for the figure was a VeriSign note, but the number is nowhere in the cited note. (It later adjusted the figure downward to $2.03 while not explaining its faulty reference from ahead of. This number is still way too high, perhaps by a figure of 50 or more.)
One more thing regarding the MarkMonitor note: is it just me, or does it equate domainers with cybersquatters on the illustration on page 4?
