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."

Domain name - so 1999

[nordelius]

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 :-)

Is it really worth it?

[broothal]

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

Too easy

[Billosaur]

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.

Its all because of the idiots..

[JeepingNET]

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..)

Link is NSFW

[Nick of NSTime]

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.

Re:pr0n.xxx

[sfjoe]

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.