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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

I think you couldn't make much money out of this anyway. 5k daily visitors sounds decent, but they are of low "quality": They quickly leave and would generate bad click-through rates. It would probably yield less than $100 a month.

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How about if you monetised it by phishing, pretending to actually be gmail.com?

How about punching a policeman, instead, and cut down on the time until you are transferred to a cell?

The DOJ only prosecutes a few hundred of these cases per year. You'd need to do a lot of phishing, or something special in order to get their attention, I suspect.

There's nothing wrong with receiving emails.

I don't think it's actually illegal to do that. Just a bit morally off.

Just receiving e-mails would hardly be a way to "monetize it by phishing".

You could probably just redirect all emails to @gmail.com, and most users would be none the wiser. Then you'd be able to trivially do password resets on any accounts that were created with the typo domain.

Or just sell the emails to unsavory people.

They were sent to you, you have a right to sell them (so long as you're in a one-party-consent state when it comes to recording). You're up to snuff law-wise.

Definetly a shady thing to do.

What does phishing have to do with receiving emails?

It would make less than 40 USD month, I guess. I am comparing to a page with similar quantity of unique visitors I have.

The entire page is 2501 bytes consisting of 246 words. How do you figure that slow readers are higher quality visitors than the others?

That's not what the parent comment said at all. They're lower quality visitors because they don't have a genuine interest in "gail.com", they most likely wanted to go to "gmail.com" and mistyped (hence the name of the post). Once they see it's not actually Gmail, most will bounce pretty quickly.

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