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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."
I've heard the saying "Sex Sells" but this is ridiculous.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Definitely goes in my great big "wish I thought of it first" list.
Czech language for absolute beginners
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 :-)
-- "You never mentioned comets before, Mac. This opens up a whole new area of negotiation." - Gordon Urquart
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.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
$14, million!
is that the most money paid for sex ever?
That must be a nice domain to have! What are the stats for "sex" in Google?
I wonder how many of these sites they could get for $14 million
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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
.. a few years ago. I wish I had registered shit,com, it wouldn't be worth crap today :-)
There's some background on the domain name here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com
as soon as they open up the *.sex domain, i'm buying
com.sex
muahahahahaha!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sex.com sold for twice the price of Business.com (to Sky Dayton's eCompanies Venture Capital fund = 100% owned).
Coincidence? I think not!
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..)
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.
I hope they get their site up and running ASAP. I am desperate to find a supplier of those Viagra pills.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
For what it's worth, the Alexa ranking for Sex.com is 3,560.
If this is a benchmark, think of the value of any top ranked site like Business.com
...And there's no link to sex.com in the story? Good grief.
qntm.org
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.
I would have thought that the miss-spelt domain names of heavily used sites would be more valuable. But then, who miss-spells sex?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
No, it was $7,500,000. This is almost twice as much.
It's not hard to get a misspelling domain like yaho.com or googel.com on trademark grounds. Generic words are where most of the big money is spent on domains these days. Check out DN Journal to get a peek of what publicly announced domain sales are like these days. Plenty of 5-figures sales for the more generic terms.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
sax.com, six.com, and sux.com? Oh, what the hell -- even syx.com? Somebody must be able to do something interesting with that one too. I expect Sox.com must be owned by Major League Baseball or the Red Sox. Hmmm...
... Are you ready? Okay. The "Sydney UniX Club" of Sydney, Australia. That's ... rather unexpected :-)
Sax.com is owned by a D. Miller in Malibu, California
Six.com is owned by some company (Xedoc Holding) in Luxembourg
sux.com is owned by ^!@#$@#$23! Damn. Almost spewed my drink over the computer monitor!
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.
Sex.com changes hands.
Years ago, I did a whois on fuck.com and it was on some sort of "reserved" list (by request of an authority figure I believe [icann?]). Now I just whois'd it and it seems to belong to some guy in Croatia named Damir. Strange...
nmap shows smtp (filtered), http, and http-proxy (port 8080) on it now. Also, shit.com seems to be almost the exact same site, and both are hosted alongside ns1.hitfarm.com and ns2.hitfarm.com. Different ips though, and shit.com wouldn't yield to an nmap scan.
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?
I can't help but wonder.
If the *.xxx domains ever come to life, what happens to sex.com ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
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.
I work for a bank here in the United States that offers traditional residential mortgages and commercial mortgages (warehouses and such). There is a ton of regulation that the government makes us comply with in regards to privacy, discrimination, etc.
My question is this: Does anyone out there have any experience with government regulations in regards to the selling of internet 'real estate'? Is this simply an ICANN regulated issue? I don't know if the two areas are similar at all, just kind of curious this morning
To shreds you say...
From the submitters website:
"Yeah I'm starting up our slashvertising again, this time using the most playfully clever name ever created. It disguises me as one of the Slashbots so I can easily destroy them from the inside! More to come soon!"
I'm surprised it took that long....
o m
Registrant:
Escom, LLC
ATTN: SEX.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA. 20172-0447
Domain Name: SEX.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Escom, LLC d54ma69r6ze@networksolutionsprivateregistration.c
ATTN: SEX.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447
570-708-8780
Record expires on 30-Nov-2015.
Record created on 18-Oct-1995.
Database last updated on 19-Jan-2006 10:45:31 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS5.SEX.COM 198.87.233.72
NS6.SEX.COM 64.244.252.131
This listing is a Network Solutions Private Registration. Mail
correspondence to this address must be sent via USPS Express Mail(TM) or
USPS Certified Mail(R); all other mail will not be processed. Be sure to
include the registrant's domain name in the address.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
even if you type in sex you get 95% of the site returned to be heath sites.
I think the reason you're seeing those results is that your google preferences have 'safe search' enabled. That's one mechanism they've implemented to achieve the effect you're describing.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I had 19x.net and I couldn't even get $50 for it. Feh.
This space available.
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.
I just spent the afternoon researching this one. If TCP packets have a color, I think it's pink.
.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.
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
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
The list of highest all-time domain sales is also interesting reading.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
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...
How can the second post be redundant?
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.
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?
Kremen's attorney, Timoth Dillon, is opposing me in a case I have against a porn spammer. The sex.com case (Kremen v. Cohen) established that a domain name is property, or at least in California. But, Tim has tracked down some of his money and Cohen is currently sitting in jail claiming that he "doesn't have the money to buy toilet paper to wipe his ass."
Remember:
Harry Mudd: Norman, I always lie.
Norman: Yes, Harry Mudd always lie.
Harry Mudd: I am lying to you now.
Norman: If you are lying to me now, and you always lie, then you must be telling the truth, but you always lie....
Fight Spammers!
everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read that.
Sex.com owner Gary Kremen was unavailable for comment...
Likely 'cause he was rolling around in his big tub of money!
TFOAE
It may sell, but it doesn't keep jobs. What's the likelyhood of getting that xbiz link tagged with a quick [nsfw] or something?
Like the last time. Or Races.com.
The first I heard of it...
Uhh... don't ever eat out the morning after... Have you ever peeled apart a day old dried up and crusted grilled cheese sandwhich with just a tad bit of mayo? :-(
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.)
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!