A long time ago, I expressed an interest in the potential of the .CM namespace. I figured that a significant number of users accidentally entered whatever.cm into their browser instead of whatever.com and that there may be an opportunity to monetize the typo traffic.

In the .CM initial landrush domain bidding, I bid on five domain names. My criteria for bidding was

1.)    The .com version of the domain name had at least one million unique visitors per month from the US, based on Comscore data.

2.)    I had in mind a clear way to monetize the traffic (e.g. relevant affiliate offers based on the user profile of the .com domain name).

3.)    I estimated that the site would have a significant volume of type-in traffic. This was based on intuition.

I ended up winning two of the five names, and I was very excited to test traffic to the two domain names. After a few months of testing, I can report that the two .cm domains received almost no traffic. I did not expect a flood of traffic, but the volume was significantly below my expectations. Going forward, I would only purchase a .cm domain name in order to protect the brand of one of my existing sites.  Let me know if you had different results from the purchase of .CM domain names.