A common typo of a web address, often happens when a person leaves out the period “.” after the “www” when typing the domain into a browser. In fact, hundreds of disputes have been filed over these types of domains over the years, with nearly every case decided in favor of the complainant. Now, Facebook appears to be the latest top site to get control of its www typo address. Earlier this month, the Whois record for wwwFacebook.com changed to Facebook Inc.
Given that Facebook.com is one of the top sites on the web, you can imagine what kind of traffic the typo received. A rough estimate (screenshot below) by Compete, puts the number of unique visitors at over 250,000 just in the month of April.
While many companies have been forced to file complaints to secure rights to their “WWW” typo domains, it appears Facebook acquired the domain name through the brand protection company MarkMonitor.
The domain name had once sold for over $15,000 according to DNJournal, but it’s unknown whether Facebook paid anything to the previous owner.
In 2000, Google won ownership of wwwGoogle.com and also prevailed in a dispute over wwwYouTube.com in 2007. In 2009, TechCrunch wrote about wwwTwitter.com after the owner had re-directed the domain to TechCrunch.com for a short period of time.
According to Whois history, wwwFacebook.com had expired in late May of this year and was listed on the SnapNames marketplace. The previous owner used Whois privacy to keep their identity a secret.
At the time of this story, wwwFacebook.com does not resolve to a web page.
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