Alexa, which records traffic statistics through its own Alexa toolbar, as well as the toolbars of several other organizations, has recorded a 571% boost in trafic heading to Verisign's website through Sitefinder.
See the numbers at Alexa, and thanks to Ben Edelman at CircleID for the heads up. At the time of his article, it was traffic rank 19 (meaning that it was in the top 20 sites of all sites on the internet), up from 1,559. Like the original authors of the web browsers, both Netscape and Microsoft, when the day dawned on them that they had shipped millions of clients that, by default, all opened on their homepages and turned their homepages into lucrative portals, Verisign seems to have realized that all of that misguided traffic could be used to make a fast buck.
More importantly is the reach figure - rank 9, meaning that it's the 9th out of the top ten sites that people visit most frequently.
What this means: A lot of people type in the wrong domain name, or click on a link to a domain name that doesn't exist. And they do it several times a day - the ninth most frequently seen site on the internet.
That is more than just power; that's money.
However, Netscape's financials sucked, and so does MSN. Can Verisign make money out of a space that MSN and Netscape couldn't? Doubtful - people don't stay there. Not yet, anyways. But if they get their way, it too will be the money-grubbing machine - with the difference being that with Netscape or MSN, you could always set your homepage to go elsewhere.
Additionally noted is a decrease in traffic for MSN - which confirms my intuition, as well - that MSN's high traffic ratings were at least in part due to people mistyping urls or clicking on broken links. Clicks that once took you to MSN, as a user of Internet Explorer, will now often take you to Verisign's Sitefinder - with an associated direct impact on MSN's ranking and reach.
Naturally, the numbers shift around a bit. Today, it's rank 23. Still, the 1,841 websites it surpassed, and the 22 ahead of it in the rankings, won't be thrilled about knowing that it got there by catching all of their misspellings and stealing their page impressions.
