That's a change in monetization models.

haha! Well, they finally do the correct thing... What else could they do?

But looking at their ad laden page, I wonder how much they would they be earning ;)

Ick. They are a real company, yet they are treating their original domain as if it were a spammy site belonging to a domain squatter. All to make a few extra bucks every month? I'd just offer the utube.com domain for a big stack of cash and wash my hands of the whole affair.

Or, y'know, keep it and leave a cheap, static landing page asking people if they are looking for youtube or universal tube & rollform. Of course, I WOULDN'T give Google the free traffic by including a link to youtube, I'd just tell them what to type ;-)

Then again, I don't run a business, so maybe the spammy page makes enough to be worth the time.

Google utube.com and try to FIND that site in the SERP.

Dan:

utube.com is typosquatting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting) and not using Black Hat SEO techniques (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hat_seo).

mrbene, utube has owned that trademark even before YouTube existed so it cannot possibly be typosquatting.

Eugene:

In the legal sense, they are definitely not cybersquatting. But in terms of behavior, they have most definitely switched to squatting-type monetization.

They get a significant amount of traffic to their domain due to the domain similarity (68 million hits in one month, reported by Wikipedia), which would lead me to believe that they have had to buy additional hosting and bandwidth to handle this. The techniques pioneered by profit-driven typosquatters would provide a bit of relief to this type of cost, given that the legal case hasn't been closed.

A lot like 'car maker' Porsche: making 1 billion profit in 2008 with building and selling cars, and 7 billion profit of financial investments. Sometimes you have to rethink your strategy ;)

Maybe they're just trying to send a message.