The Republic of Cameroon is blessed with many natural riches – among them copious quantities of coffee, cocoa and crude oil.

To these more traditional sources of wealth the West African country has recently added a new income stream: the royalties from one of the most lucrative internet country codes in the world.

Cameroon’s .cm suffix is a common mistyping of the most popular top level domain, .com, meaning that each day thousands of internet users searching for .com sites are directed Cameroonian web addresses which do not exist.

Typically when a browser is unable to locate the site among the 200 or so .cm sites that are registered, an error message is displayed.

Under a deal signed by the Cameroonian Government in the middle of last year, however, any request for a .cm sites that is not registered is now sent to a ‘parking’ page where adverts relevant to the site the user intended to visit are displayed.

Type in almost any .cm address, including company names (microsoft.cm) and themes (party.cm; beer.cm) and the browser will be redirected to an advertising-laden page called ‘agoga.com’.

The deal, struck with a Canadian internet entrepreneur who owns more than 300,000 domain names, was seen by the Government as a chance to capitalise on the unexpected value of the .cm domain, the country’s largest internet service provider said.

Only an estimated 10,000 of the Cameroon’s 18 million citizens have internet connections, and the majority of the .cm addresses that are registered with the Government agency that runs the country’s server, ANTIC, are official sites.

‘Typo-squatting’ – the purchasing of domain names which are similar to hugely popular addresses to take advantage when users mistype – is recognised as a lucrative source of advertising revenue.

Under the deal reached with Cameroon, however, any request for an unregistered .cm site will default to Agoga’s site – as opposed to the company having to own the domain name, meaning that the number of searches from which Agoga will benefit is potentially limitless.

“We can continue to register legitimate .cm names – it’s just when a page doesn’t exist that the person searching is sent automatically to Agoga,” a spokesman for Cameroon’s largest internet service provider (ISP), Camtel, told Times Online from Yaounde.

Cameroon is the latest in a succession of countries to have benefited financially from the licensing of their country codes.

In 1998, the south Pacific nation of Tuvalu, which owned the rights to .tv, signed a 12-year deal worth $50 million with the .tv corporation as a way of supplementing the income from its exports of copra, a form of dried coconut.

Kevin Ham, the Vancouver-born businessman who runs agoga.com, is understood to earn more than $70 million a year from his collection of domain names, which includes god.com and satan.com.

Mr Ham, whose sites reportedly receive 30 million unique visitors a month, is said to be negotiating similar deals with Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et).

Bloggers criticised Agoga’s business as “sneaky” and “not in the spirit of the internet”.

“It’s a total disservice to internet users and to brand names which doesn't provide any benefit to anyone,” David Ulevitch, chief executive of OpenDNS, a company which redirects users to the correct site when they mistype a domain name, said.

A writer on the blog ‘Swan Fungus’ said: “I wonder if these people's brains work on a different plane, where the sole focus in on dishonorable ways to make a quick buck.”

On its website, Agoga describes its service as “providing top level domain controllers with a way to earn money from the otherwise unused segment of the domain,” and offers a way for companies who feel the service infringes their trademark to get in touch.

Neither Agoga nor the Cameroonian National Agency for Information and Communication Technology (ANTIC) were available for comment.

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