Domain Name Sold for Millions

Luke PiWalker writes "The infamous and controversial domain Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million. Sex.com owner Gary Kremen was unavailable for comment, but a source from Kremen's company, Grant Media, told XBiz that sales for the famous domain name will still be handled through Grant Media's San Francisco offices. While other terms of the acquisition remain unknown, XBiz was able to locate information on the deal through a company called InternetRealEstate.com, which shares office space in Boston with Domain Name Acquisition Group (DNAG), a company that was involved in a lawsuit surrounding the Sex.com domain in September."

Sex Sells

I've heard the saying "Sex Sells" but this is ridiculous.

$14 million

Definitely goes in my great big "wish I thought of it first" list.

Domain name - so 1999

Are domain names really that valuable anymore? Given recent stories on the way that search engines are leaching value from web resources, doesn't the default action of yer average mom-and-dad browser involve typing a company name into google rather than typing an url into the address bar? Er - first post (both EVAR and on this article). Guess I was just that lucky :-)

Today's sexy anagram

Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million.

Anagram 'Escom' and you get 'Comes' - now we know why they wanted it so bad.

expensive sex.

$14, million!

is that the most money paid for sex ever?

Re:expensive sex.

$14, million! is that the most money paid for sex ever?

It's like coitus interruptus for geeks, you pay $14 million for sex and all you get is a domain name.

Nice

That must be a nice domain to have! What are the stats for "sex" in Google?

Is it really worth it?

I wonder how many of these sites [google.com] they could get for $14 million

Too easy

There are a plethora of jokes to be made at this point... I'll refrain. It's just amazing how much money there is to be made in the domain name game. When you think about it, what is a domain name? On the technical level, it's just something plugged into DNS servers so people don't have to remember IPv4 codes. But on the media side of things, your domain name is an attribute, you're billboard on the information superhighway. And when you think about it, how smart were some people when they registered the more obvious domains back at the start? And now they're reaping the rewards. Sex.com was just too obvious to pass up, and now it's worth $14 million. That's easy money.

Business.com went for pretty much the same price..

.. a few years ago. I wish I had registered shit,com, it wouldn't be worth crap today :-)

Wikipedia article

There's some background on the domain name here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com [wikipedia.org]

just wait

as soon as they open up the *.sex domain, i'm buying

com.sex

muahahahahaha!

Its all because of the idiots..

The funny thing is it totally makes sense for it to cost that amount... Think of how many 14 year old males and idiot computer users must type in sex.com. A part of business not many people like to admit but really does sell is selling to idiots. The sex industry is a billion dollar industry and while most of it is very legit the people making the big money is the damn reseller sites that don't even host their own adult content. They just link to others so by owning a site like sex.com you could make millions a year. Someone made reference however to how Google and others are now really changing the way URLs work and I have to agree. While sex.com is still a great buy I think the idiot who type in sex.com in their URL window will also be the type to put stupid stuff in Google and get back the same results. Now this is where google and other can are are helping. Back in the day you searched anything in a search engine and half the sites where either mislabeled or porn. I really do not find this much anymore and even if you type in sex you get 95% of the site returned to be heath sites. I applaud Google for this and while I'm not one for censorship or hiding porn I think this move is one for the good. As I had people making money off the dumb (or jealous..)

Sex.com -- a sex superstore!

Look at the front page! They have everything! Oh, wait. Except for links to other sites, there's just a page asking for your e-mail address with a statement that by giving them your address you're asking them to send you lots of e-mail.

Guess they've got to pay for that domain name somehow.

At Last!

I hope they get their site up and running ASAP. I am desperate to find a supplier of those Viagra pills.

Alexa Rank...3,560

For what it's worth, the Alexa ranking [alexa.com] for Sex.com is 3,560.
If this is a benchmark, think of the value of any top ranked site like Business.com [alexa.com]

No link?

...And there's no link to sex.com [sex.com] in the story? Good grief.

February issue of Playboy

There is an long article about sex.com in the current February issue of Playboy. I have not finished it yet, but it so far it is well written and interesting. There is also an interview with Al Franken that is more insightful than humorous. So pick-up the issue or check playboy.com, sometimes they have portions of articles there with no charge.

what about the miss-spellings?

I would have thought that the miss-spelt domain names of heavily used sites would be more valuable. But then, who miss-spells sex?

Wow. I wonder how much for...

sax.com, six.com, and sux.com? Oh, what the hell -- even syx.com? Somebody must be able to do something interesting with that one too. I expect Sox.com must be owned by Major League Baseball or the Red Sox. Hmmm...

Sax.com is owned by a D. Miller in Malibu, California
Six.com is owned by some company (Xedoc Holding) in Luxembourg
sux.com is owned by ^!@#$@#$23! Damn. Almost spewed my drink over the computer monitor! ... Are you ready? Okay. The "Sydney UniX Club" of Sydney, Australia. That's ... rather unexpected :-)
syx.com is owned by "Syx E Business Solutions" in Norway

Strangely enough, sox.com isn't owned by the Boston Red Sox, as I would have expected. It is owned by a "William Boston" in Washington. That name is a weird coincidence, though.

The headline should've been:

Sex.com changes hands.

What's so great?

This is too '90's for words. I remember when the term "cybersquatting" was coined, and domains like "furniture.com" and "syndicatednews.com" were making millions for their housewife or cab driver owners.

Really, though, what's the advantage of these generic names? Do you buy your books at books.com? I usually get mine at a place called Amazon. Do people (who actually pay for it) download their music from music.com, or iTunes? If, as another post pointed out, the importance of a domain is not in its use for browser navigation, but in the billboard/TV/magazine copy in which it appears, isn't it better to be unique and memorable?

pr0n.xxx

I'm still suprised when the porn sites resist the .xxx domain. It seems to me it would put an end to the whining and moaning. Parents could just block *.xxx, and the porn companies could get on with their business and lay off a few of their legal staff. People could set up *.xxx only search engines. There's a world of possibilities here.

Re:pr0n.xxx

That solution will neither help people find porn nor stop the christians from whining about it. The problem isn't about segregating porn, but determinig what porn is. Are 18th century impressionist nudes porn? What about Playboy? Is graphical information about vaginal yeast infections porn? If we set up a system where all "porn" goes in the .xxx domain, then someone has to decide what is and is not required to go there. That "someone" is likely to be a Republican so that means all sex education material and anything relating to birth control or LGBT issues will be classified as porn and forced into the ghetto.

19x.net

I had 19x.net and I couldn't even get $50 for it. Feh.

Link is NSFW

Come on, even Fark lets you know when a link is NSFW. Please put some kind of indicator there. I didn't notice the naked pictures until I finished reading the article.

Oh wait, there are two things wrong with that statement:

1. I read the article.
2. I read the article instead of looking at naked ladies.

Research...

I just spent the afternoon researching this one. If TCP packets have a color, I think it's pink.

The odd things that strike me about this deal is that people have been 'Googlelized', in that the new Domain name registery is effectively the search engines. You just type what you are looking for into Google(!), even grandma does it (nice image eh?).

What with also the impending .xxx thing meaning a devaluation of the sexy xyz.com's value, then this just makes it seem like a 'bragging rights' buy. Bad business.

Mind you, if you just spent 14 big ones on a domain name then you're probably hung like a mouse, and could do with all the help you can get...

NA

44 domains sold for $100K or more last year

While this deal is the biggest ever, there are plenty of top-dollar domain sales taking place these days. Check out the top sales of 2005 [dnjournal.com] over at Domain Name Journal and you'll find that at least 44 domains sold for more than $100,000 last year, including a blog domain (blogster.com) and even a typo (voyuer.com).

The list of highest all-time domain sales [multireg.com] is also interesting reading.

Geez, money maker, what?

Check out the wikipedia page from TFA. This Gary Kremen made around $65m from S M Cohen for fraud and another $20m from verisign for improperly transferring the domain. and now he's just got another $14m from Escom LLC. Not to mention all the revenue from the site itself.. this is one rich puppy...

Sex Sells

wow what to do with 14 million dollars.
1. retire and never have to lift a finger again.
2. pay someone to do my job.
3. buy a nice car that is even nice enough for a geek to pick up chicks.
4. or buy one single small domain

i think that was a smart buy. i mean who would rather never have to work again so you can stay home all day on your computer, when they could buy a domain name. hmmmm.

NERD.COM, FOLK.COM coming up

In the wake of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, my company has decided to put a few old-school domains we've had up for sale. It will be interesting to see what we can get. We registered these domains in 1995 and never intended to sell them as property themselves, but we need resources now to rebuild our networks and business after the destruction of New Orleans.

Among others, we're trying to determine what kind of price we might get for domains like: NERD.COM, FOLK.COM, IBL.COM, PROMARKETING.COM, and a few others.

Ironically, I submitted an "Ask Slashdot" story on this issue with more details yesterday that was rejected. It is boggling the prices these domains are going for now. We sold WISDOM.COM for $475k around 2000 and at the time that was one of the top three highest cash sales of a domain name. Now it looks like nothing.

So, if anyone thinks they can help us with the sale of some of these domains, there's a form on the site. The company who brokered the last sale we did walked away with $47,000 in commission. Can NERD or FOLK go for six figures?

Five bucks says NetSol bungles the transfer.

Like the last time. Or Races.com.

It could if...

It could if it's like the posts under one of his other user names. (Luke PiWalker) He just plagiarizes other people's posts. He has had articles published by Slashdot that I've found elsewhere on the internet as well. He's just a plagiarizing karma whore. (As NeutronCowboy puts it.)