Sex.com is Going Down

nathanielinbrazil writes "A motion to dismiss the involuntary bankruptcy of Sex.com has been filed in a California court. Operational turmoil has put its owner in the doghouse with its creditors, who want to take over. 'It's the best domain in the world by far,' said Mike Mann, who has tried to keep the creditors at bay. Sex.com is estimated to be worth $100m. Let the games begin!"

Comments

Um

[jav1231]

I always thought going down had been a big part of their strategy? :p

Re:Um

[h00manist]

Is sex still profitable on the net? How did these guys manage to mess up? It doesn't seem to take a genius to sell sex online.

Re:Um

[Aeros]

I just love how he thinks this is worth $100 million!

Re:Um

[Shakrai]

How did these guys manage to mess up? It doesn't seem to take a genius to sell sex online.

You mean people actually pay for porn on the internet? C'mon, it's been available for free for as long as the internet has been around.

Re:Um

[iamhassi]

"I just love how he thinks this is worth $100 million!"

I think he thinks if he says it enough times it will come true.

Ok Mike Mann, tap your heels together three times and say "Sex.com is worth $100 million... Sex.com is worth $100 million... Sex.com is worth $100 million..."

Re:Um

[PolygamousRanchKid]

What sex? A name like "sex.com" just isn't specific enough anymore. It's just like a department store trying to compete with small, specialty stores.

Would a serious skater buy a board at Wal-Mart?

If you want to sell sex on the Internet, target a specific market segment, with a domain like:

TeenLesbiansWithTripleHeadedDildoes.com, or

GranniesScatRompWithLordOfTheRingCharacters.com, or

CatholicSchoolTeachersAbusingSchoolKids.com . . .

. . . although, for the last one, you can get the real thing for free by attending church . . .

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Sex is pretty much not profitable any more.

There are a few sites making money by selling dating memberships, mostly tube sites like pornhub.com.
Niche sites also do ok. The rest don't do so well.

Re:Um

[sjwest]

Title holders or category names in tld's are bad - accountant.com and consultant got used by email spammers and other crooks in my experience as a spammer hunter.

Never been to 'sex' either primarily because of the strange history of who 'owns' it, and that there are better sex sites out there.

business.com was another one - isnt that the one once owned by football team owner who now hates the internet ?

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it that everybody's forgotten that advertisement revenues are quite significant on high visibility (pun unintended) sites?

Re:Um

[northernfrights]

This is how:

We're hard at work on our website. We've got some great stuff in store for Sex.com for 2010, including:

-dating: get matched with sexy singles (and couples)
-classifieds: buy and sell merchandise, find work.

Sound like a $100million website to anyone?

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, I think they haven't been going down enough.

Re:Um

[h00manist]

How is it that everybody's forgotten that advertisement revenues are quite significant on high visibility (pun unintended) sites?

the guys at sex.com got addicted to expensive hookers and blow, so they hookers and drug dealers took them to court. Don't know if they will recover the blow and sex, it's all gone. But they will all enjoy the ride, it's part of their show.

Re:Um

[h00manist]

it forwards to http://searchportal.information.com/?o_id=65709&domainname=sex.com from here. I am accessing from sao paulo though.

Re:Um

[jav1231]

PolygamousRanchKid, you are a sick bastard! Beer?

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm...pixelated boobies!

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

....mmm subdomains...

Re:Um

[Thinboy00]

"I just love how he thinks this is worth $100 million!"

I think he thinks if he says it enough times it will come true.

Like SCO/Darl McBride?

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you suck. NONE of those links work!

Re:Um

[n30na]

They'll pay for sex toys, though.

Re:Um

[xtracto]

And they'll also pay for "escorts" services and the like.

In fact, a GOOD escort services web page (say, for New York City or another big city) can improve the business quite a lot.

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

With the rise of Youtube-style content theft sites, the general inadequacy of the DMCA for small to medium business in the face of the volume of stolen content, and the global economic downturn showing us that Adult was not recession proof as was always assumed, the number of people paying has plummeted.

3 years ago it was a multibillion $$ industry. These days there are 4 or 5 major players actually selling content on credit-card members only sites, and all the 'free porn' sites [pornhub, redtube, tube8 etc] just sell 'Adult Dating' scams infested with Nigerian Princesses and worse.

This has already, interestingly enough, led to the total demise of fresh content production, and with no foreseeable change in the status quo the actual volume of porn produced will trickle to a near standstill. This is the argument Hollywood uses for their anti-piracy initiatives, but for them it's FUD as they have the forces of the FBI etc. behind them. For us it's reality, as no lawmaker is going to hang his political hat on the career suicide notion of supporting the US porn industry.

Source: I have worked for many years in the online Adult industry

Re:Um

[linhares]

"I just love how he thinks this is worth $100 million!" I think he thinks if he says it enough times it will come true. Ok Mike Mann, tap your heels together three times and say "Sex.com is worth $100 million... Sex.com is worth $100 million... Sex.com is worth $100 million..."

I'm sure that if he wasn't so anal about the price the growth prospects would be better.

Re:Um

[AlgorithMan]

none of these domains exist... thanks for wasting my time, asshole...

;-)

Re:Um

[rgviza]

He's probably picked up some bad habits...

Re:Um

[Jenming]

When the porn industry starts making movies like "The opening of misty beethoven" again i will start buying new porn.

Re:Um

[halcyon1234]

I always thought going down had been a big part of their strategy? :p

*whoosh*

That's the sound of the joke going over your head.

*thump*

That's the sound of the joke hitting me in the lower abdomen

Re:Um

[Archades54]

Then you have also witnessed the sheer amount of amateur porn being produced and distributed by such websites as well, the professional industry may be suffering but the "fun" amateurs are rising due to easy distribution. Whilst most is probably free, I've seen some sites where amateurs are paid for their content they produce.

With access to decent cameras, easy distribution, even unpaid the porn industry is becoming far more user-created, why would anyone want to buy porn? People are giving it away for free and loving it.

Re:Um

[Civil_Disobedient]

Well, here's your chance to make a million fucks. I mean bucks.

Re:Um

[robot256]

Seriously, how much porn do we really need? Ever? If it has little or no artistic value, then one gang bang video is as good as the next, the pirated video market will reach saturation and and paying customers will demand less and less production. Only better/more interesting product will drive fresh consumption. Nothing else is worth paying for.

Oh, and this applies to Hollywood too. As long as you produce true art and not crap that isn't even worth watching Hulu ads for, you will survive as an industry in spite of the piracy.

Re:Um

[Tubal-Cain]

Yes

Re:Um

[Jedi Alec]

With access to decent cameras, easy distribution, even unpaid the porn industry is becoming far more user-created, why would anyone want to buy porn? People are giving it away for free and loving it.

And, weird as this may sound, some of us find porn where all the participants are visibly enjoying themselves instead of just pretending and staring into the camera longingly more fun to watch.

Re:Um

[Archades54]

Not sure what amateur porn you've seen where they don't visibly look like they're enjoying themselves:P Plenty of amateur orgies even where everyone seems to enjoy it?

Re:Um

[Mike Buddha]

Yeah, this whole fetish about the value of "sex.com" fairly reeks of web 1.0. It's so dot-com. It's a proven fact that guys will type in sexy-mona-doing-it-with-her-lesbian-friend-with-a-strap-on.com if Mona's got the goods, even though they don't have to thanks to Google.

Re:Um

[Mike Buddha]

You're gay, right?

$100,000,000 ?

[vikingpower]

Hmmm, well - to my N-th generation offspring ( N > 3 ), "terraformation.com" is going to be worth a lot more than that...

One owner survived an assassination attempt

[Anonymous Coward]

Or I vaguely remember reading that somewhere.

Sex kills. :P

Re:One owner survived an assassination attempt

[tkg]

Actually it's "speed kills", or in this case, premature ejaculation.

Let it begin! Let it begin!

[Moryath]

Let the games begin!

Let the jokes begin - starting with the article's double entendre headline! This should be more fun than the naming of Nintendo's Weewee!

Not worth that much i guess

[thsoundman]

If the domain is "so valuble" then why can't he sell it? Who the hell values these things? Granted it's a much clamored for domain but seriously... somthing is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. If no one is willing to pay for the domain it's not worth 100 million.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[courteaudotbiz]

I totally agree. And even if someone is crazy enough to pay that much for sex.com, he's gonna have to know how to make money out of it. With all this free porn available on the net, anyone trying to make money out of porn will have more and more difficulties, except with VERY HARDCORE users who will always be willing to pay for higher quality videos, false interactions (sex chat) and all that stuff...

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[thsoundman]

Not to mention you can get full length videos on the net for free now. Porn isn't going to be etting any more popular. Granted it still makes a gargantun amount of money but I can't see much more growth potential. Until they can develop somthing like a holodeck they have already done everything... seriously... everything. Personally I can't see how anyone would pay that kind of money for a Non-Physical piece of property but then hey someone spent 250k on a virtual space station so what do I know :P

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Nesman64]

Nothing seems to be worth its value anymore.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[tverbeek]

I'd think you could make very good money by just selling advertising space on sex.com. Or running just about any kind of business whose target market has a smutty sense of humor. For example, start selling discounted college textbooks from a site called sex.com, throw in some gender-selectable eye candy, and students across North America will beat (off) a path to your door.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

A better question is why can't he get debtor in possession financing. What is needed in a situation like this is a pool of outside investors and a manager to "fix" the business issues and buy out the unsecured creditors at a discount, and move forward. porn is not going away any time soon, although the revenue model is changing and may be too difficult for anyone to manage.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[courteaudotbiz]

Then why don't you buy it? You seem to have a great business plan! But maybe the banks will tell you that they can "only" lend you 75% of the amount... Do you have 25,000,000$ at hand?

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Shakrai]

With all [persiankitty.com] this [redtube.com] free [youporn.com] porn [bulldoglist.com] available on the net

You left out alt.binaries ;)

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[vikingpower]

You forgot slutload.com ....

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[alexhs]

I can't see much more growth potential.

Check your e-mail, I'm sure you haven't tried all pills yet.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with sex.com: About 10 years ago, the domain name got transfered owner under "suspicious circumstances", which resulted in a lawsuit, which resulted in an injunction from the name from being used. The legal battle has raged on since (which is why if you go to sex.com you see it pretty much parked).

It's not that the name is worthless - it's that there's pretty much no content at the site, the legal battle is not over, and the owner has run out of money, which is why creditors want to take it over.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Untrue, now in the US, health insurance is no longer bound by that rule, since we have to buy it regardless of price.

I really hope that gets struck down in court, mandating liability insurance is one thing (I can simply not drive on public roads), but this is just a terrible law. Not saying that what we had worked, but forcing people to buy something is just wrong.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It's such a huge market, though, that even all the free porn in the world doesn't hurt it. People still buy a lot of porn, where I live you can't really easily find any cds anymore. There used to be a lot of cds stores, nowadays there are a few in a mall here or there. Now, porn dvds are found in any magazine shop.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Beyond the growth of free stuff, and good old fashioned piracy, the value of generalist site names, even in classy TLDs, seems to have been basically destroyed by the rise of search engines that don't suck.

Back in the bad old days, when searching was seriously limited and not very good, having a URL (or AOL keyword, god help us all) that would be immediately obvious to a desperate n00b might well have had real value.

These days, though, you either know exactly where you are going, or you use your browser's search box as a kind of sloppy-natural-language-command-line thing and enter your hopes and wishes and questions with varying degrees of vagueness. Then, typically, the search engine does a pretty good job of figuring out what you want, and gives you some plausible options, no matter what their URLs are.

If anything, the truly "obvious" URLs are probably worth less than some of the weird ones, now. Upholding a trademark(without having to constantly append your .TLD in advertisements) is almost certainly easier if your company name/URL is some catchy nonsense word than if it is something that would have helped a n00b 10 or 15 years ago.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[nathanielinbrazil]

I understand that the only way a bankruptcy court would be involved is because another court had entered the fray. I suspect that another court had granted one of the lenders the right to auction off the SITE, including the domain name. It was scheduled and DOM files the Motion to Dismiss claiming he had both domestic and international bidders on a date certain. Whether or not the price makes sense, he will be compelled to demonstrate to the court that he indeed did have those potential buyers.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

ssssh!!! don't talk about usenet!

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Archon-X]

I'm sorry, but like most people that don't work in the industry, you don't have a clue how it operates, the margins it runs, the advertising structures, etc etc.

The largest tube sites are either owned by the latest porn sites (brazzers, etc) - or make huge amounts from selling ad spots (Redtube: minimum 150k for a well placed 30 day spot). Guess what - they're 'making money out of porn' - just not in the older constructs of a paysite.

I personally dropped $125,000 on highly-niched domain a few months back, and we're already at 85% ROI. Interesting factoid: Both youporn and persiankitty, and hundreds more 'free porn sites' promote it, and make quite nice sums off it too.

In brief: Your understanding of how the market works even on a fundamental level is completely flawed.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[v1]

last I heard on this, the domain owner had written signed request on file at his registrar to not transfer the domain unless he was there in person with valid IDs because so many people had tried to fraud the domain from him.

Then some yutz at the registrar let someone fax in a request for a transfer, and he had quite a fight to get it back, but got it back in surprisingly short order.

From there I didn't hear any further on it. You'd think that if that many people were that desperate to get their hands on it, it ought to be worth something. Maybe not 100 mil, but something. With all the banner revenue he has to be getting, I don't understand how he's broke. That should have been his meal-ticket for life. Maybe not extremely lucrative, but should have at least been a nice steady income forever.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Dun Malg]

You shut your mouth. You shut your mouth, and you never open it again.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Lando]

Website outlook gives a value of around 62k USD http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.sex.com

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong kind of teabagging in an article about sex.com.

Kindly STFU.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[thsoundman]

I understand how advertising works just fine sir... but for the end user it doesn't cost a dime. Thats what I was getting at. Why would the average person pay for it if they can get it for free. I know very well how the industry works because i have associates who work within it.

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Dr. Spork]

I think you're exactly right. Painfully obvious domain names just don't have much value anymore. I mean, someone who has been in a coma for the last 15 years really might type "sex.com" into the URL bar when they're looking for sex, and "search.com" when they're looking for a search engine, and "books.com" when they're looking for books. But it's crazy to think that a website will become a big player in a well-established field just because they have the most banal and obvious domain name. Google and Amazon have nothing to fear from "search.com" and "books.com" respectively, and neither do the thousands of established porn websites have anything to fear from "sex.com".

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[Jedi Alec]

Who cares what it costs the end user? The porn industry has figured out what the market is demanding and has switched supply to match that, making profit in the progress. More money is coming in than is going out, where it's coming from doesn't matter.

Oh, the irony of the porn industry being the only part of the moviemaking establishment that happily embraces the new tech. MPAA guys, are you paying attention? Piling on even more DRM and legislation won't solve your problems because we'll just watch more porn instead. ;-)

Re:Not worth that much i guess

[OrwellianLurker]

YOU JUST DON'T GET IT MAN.

the best domain in the world?

[Virtucon]

What about google.com? microsoft.com?

I'd point out that those sites have made substantially more money for their owners than sex.com. Just reading the stories about this domain, the theft, the international intrigue it makes me think it's the most nefarious domain on the network, but hardly the best one. It reminds me of the story of "the monkey's paw" and unfortunately that was fiction, this is reality.

Re:the best domain in the world?

[neoform]

google.com and microsoft.com are valuable only because of the businesses behind them. Sex.com by itself has far more intrinsic value. The only domain I'd value more than sex.com would be business.com.

Re:the best domain in the world?

[Virtucon]

If you read the filing, the whole bankruptcy is around money invested for "building a website." If there is intrinsic value then just having people coming to a pic of a naked chic should be a great business model. Wait, that won't work, as evidenced by the bankruptcy.

Content is king, not the domain name.

Re:the best domain in the world?

[Hognoxious]

I'm not sure any domain of the form $someword.com is intrinsically valuable when you can just type $someword into your favorite search engine.

Re:the best domain in the world?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you do with business.com? Why would anyone go there? Hmm, I feel like doing some "business" today. I don't have any specific kind of business in mind, I bet business.com has some interesting business that I could do, I'll go check that out.

Re:the best domain in the world?

[Locke2005]

just having people coming to a pic of a naked chic More double entendre?

Re:the best domain in the world?

[dangitman]

The only domain I'd value more than sex.com would be business.com.

Why? I don't think many people start their day by typing "business.com" into a browser. Maybe you could sell a few business socks there, but not much more.

Re:the best domain in the world?

[neoform]

Restaurants go bankrupt all the time, does that mean there's no money to be made from running a restaurant?

Just because sex.com was poorly managed, does not mean the domain has any less value.

The most common strategy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like pizza.com, I bet a lot more people search google for sex than try sex.com... I mean, strictly hypothetically speaking.

Re:The most common strategy...

[Yamata no Orochi]

I agree this is probably the case now. It probably wasn't the case 15 years ago. I remember arbitrarily trying website.com when I wanted to find some information or subject matter when I was young.

Oblig

[AndGodSed]

I guess they're screwed then.

Re:Oblig

[crazyvas]

And we all knew there were going to come down to this...

rubbing peters to pay paul

[forgot_my_username]

The most interesting part of the article is where Mike Mann, the guy who runs sex.com, said that he wanted to give all the proceeds to charity!

I know that there is a great joke there... but my brain is still in shock


--------
No one can do everything perfectly; mistakes happen. But we’re assassins: when we make mistakes, people live

Re:rubbing peters to pay paul

[Sulphur]

The most interesting part of the article is where Mike Mann, the guy who runs sex.com, said that he wanted to give all the proceeds to charity!

That's Charity.

Is it really worth 100 metres?

[celibate for life]

I thought worth should be measured in currency.

Re:Is it really worth 100 metres?

[tverbeek]

In the porn industry it's all about sizes.

It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[Rogerborg]

But aren't domain names pretty irrelevant now in the Brave Google World?

The subset of people naive, dumb or drunk enough to just type "sex" in the url bar probably doesn't intersect in any meaningful way with people who own a credit card and are capable of typing in the number.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[celibate for life]

You make the incorrect assumption that it takes brains to own and/or use a credit card. In fact, the vast majority of CC users lack basic math skills and get entangled in unredeemable debt forever.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[tverbeek]

The intersection of those two sets is huge. I staff a corporate help desk and I talk to dozens of people a week who don't know the difference between the URL field and the search field.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[De Lemming]

And even typing "sex" in the url bar won't bring you to sex.com. By default, IE will do a Bing search, Chrome will do a Google search, and Firefox will simply try to connect to the "sex" domain, which will fail (unless you have a web server named sex on your internal network).

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[celibate for life]

IE6 won't do a Bing search, it will try to load sex.com instead. Yes, people still use IE6.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[bluefoxlucid]

That's my situation. I'm having trouble killing my credit card, but I've just paid my last $300+ college bill and my last $150+ maintenance bill on my apartment for a prior issue. I'm also switching off my evil car insurance company because everyone quotes me $1000-$1500 lower per 6 months, for the same coverage! Good hands... with sticky fingers.

Mind you, I also have my 401(k) contributions set obscenely high, so I intentionally have a very harsh financial situation. My intent is to pay off my $18000 car loan, and my $1300 credit card, and have some $1200/mo of money a month. I'll sack some away, and... probably up my 401(k) again. I like being poor, I guess. I mean right now I'm shaking, I'm feeling the pain, and my $200/mo allowance is almost bankrupting me; but if I'm careful I'll make it... next time I'm paying for college up front out of savings though.

I might just buy another car. Pay my car under its trade-in (or market sale) value-- which is some $10000-$12000-- and find something used that passes a PPI to my satisfaction (suspension issues I can fix, minor brake system issues i.e. new master cylinder I can fix, etc) for around $4000. Wiggle my way out of $6000-$8000 of debt by plodding down $4000 head on. The extra $500/mo I'll have coming in will cover any minor repairs I may need, or an engine rebuild.

Trust me, a stream of $4000 of tune-ups and minor repairs of aging not-yet-dead parts is way better than a $4000 loan; you can sit on the minor repairs while you bank a few grand as a cash buffer, and the bank won't come after you. You want that cash buffer to handle EMERGENCY repairs-- things that are just broken, or that will force other systems to fail i.e. any exhaust system issue (if the cat clogs, it'll damage your engine, EGR, oxygen sensor... and if the EGR or O2 sensors go, they'll damage each other and the cat). Non-essential maintenance i.e. "I'd like to replace all the brake lines, they're 15 years and 150,000 miles old but they work just fine" can wait a few months.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not that this helps their confusion; but browsers are increasingly conflating the two as well, probably because they know that customer service(and low support costs) is easier to achieve through pandering than through education.

In any fairly recent FF, for instance, if you just enter a single word or phrase, obviously not a URL, in the URL field, it interprets that as a search query, and dumps you to the page of whatever search engine is registered as default, with that query already run for you. I believe Chrome does the same thing, only your search provider is always google, and I'm assuming that IE will start doing the same thing sooner or later, if it hasn't already. I can't speak for Opera, Safari, and suchlike.

It is unfortunate that many people have substantial difficultly with making basic abstract distinctions, I suspect that their lives would be better for it; but browser fields are really not a very important case. In the vast majority of cases, and the overwhelming majority of cases generated by n00bs, the string entered into the field is pretty obviously either a URL or just a bunch of words. It isn't rocket surgery to distinguish between the two, and load the URL as normal, and feed the just a bunch of words to some search engine.

The ability to understand abstract distinctions, even on a low level, construct useful working models of complex systems, and so forth, are extremely valuable skills, and people's interactions with software show, frequently, either how bad people are at those, or how awful the software is; but it isn't at all clear that the distinction between the URL field and the search filed is actually a useful one. In the vast majority of cases, it is fairly easy to algorithmically infer the user's intent, and "do the right thing" and, for the power users and their corner cases, it won't kill anybody to have a configurable "Interpret URLs strictly, and have a separate box for search queries" option somewhere, or even just a command line style set of switches that you can use in the single input field.

In conqueror, for instance, there are a whole bunch of short default prefixes, and it is easy for the user to define more. "gg:test", for example, does a google search for "test". "ggl:test" is equivalent to using "I'm feeling lucky" when google searching for test. "wp:" would do a wikipedia search, "uspto:" searches the U.S. patend database, and so forth. There are dozens by default, and it is trivial to configure more.

Since the n00bs are confused by the distinction; but the distinction is not really necessary in most cases, we really ought to collapse it. For power uses, separate boxes and tabbing and shift-tabbing around are clumsy, a few simple, terse text commands, with substantial depth for those who want it, are the way to go.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[tverbeek]

Just FYI, I see or hear* the opposite far more often: people typing simple URLs into the search field, whether it's the one in the corner next to the URL field, or even the one found on their home page (Google, MSN, Yahoo). I don't have the data at hand, but a nontrivial amount of searches on those sites are for fully qualified domain names.

*Typical example:
Me on the phone: "Please type example dot com in the address field, hit Enter, and look for the ____ icon in the upper right corner."
User: "I don't see that icon."
(A few probing questions later)
Me: "Is there a Google logo in the upper left corner?"
User: "Yes."

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[Archon-X]

Woops! Wrong window, I thought was my blog that noone read. My bad.

Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so

[Anonymous Coward]

I staff a corporate help desk and I talk to dozens of people a week who don't know the difference between the URL field and the search field.

The obvious answer to this is to do what Chrome did and just merge the two. Of course this further devalues domain names like the one in question because people actually have to type the .com part to avoid the browser interpreting it as a search.

Thought that domain name hype was over

[Bearhouse]

Surely we've moved on from this?
Is not getting a high ranking in search engine responses more important these days?
For example, I just typed 'sex' into my browser address line, (Firefox and with Google default search), and it took me straight to 'pornhub.com' (NSFW!)

Re:Thought that domain name hype was over

[CyberDragon777]

'pornhub.com' (NSFW!)

*gasp!*

Thanks for the warning!

Re:Thought that domain name hype was over

[Anonymous Coward]

.... 'pornhub.com' (NSFW!)

you dont say

Re:Thought that domain name hype was over

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely we've moved on from this?
Is not getting a high ranking in search engine responses more important these days?
For example, I just typed 'sex' into my browser address line, (Firefox and with Google default search), and it took me straight to 'pornhub.com' (NSFW!)

Don't worry if you're at work, pornhub.com is currently being slashdotted.

I don't go there

[DNS-and-BIND]

Anyone out there who actually makes it a habit to go to sex.com? Frankly I've never heard of them since the big sale however many years ago that was. And who goes to business.com? Sure, they're generic keywords with .com behind them, but honestly where's the value in a name?

Re:I don't go there

[thsoundman]

The names themselves don't have any value, at least i don't think so, I rarely go to direct web addresses anymore. You could have website: www.xyzilovepennies123.com/blah and it wouldn't matter as long as you showed up in the first page of google results.

Re:I don't go there

[Hatta]

For that matter are there *any* generic keyword domains that have any use whatsoever?

Re:I don't go there

[tverbeek]

Take a Marketing class, and find out.

Re:I don't go there

[Shakrai]

Sure. h, t, t, p, colon, slash, slash, slashdot, dot, org.

Re:I don't go there

[aardwolf64]

You go right ahead and handle your finances from http://www.geocities.com/westealyourmoney/2q38948234.php. As for myself, I'd prefer using paypal.com.

Re:I don't go there

[Zorque]

Paypal is another of the companies using non-generic domains. If it was "money.com" or something, you'd have a point, but it's a catchy moniker instead.

Re:I don't go there

[corbettw]

Yeah, cause PayPal doesn't have a history of stealing people's money.

Re:I don't go there

[Anonymous Coward]

weather.com is a decent weather site.

Going down

[the_hellspawn]

LOL! Oh, yeah that's right...yeah!

Timing Is Everything

[DynaSoar]

Since this appears to be real, it's a darn good thing the article was posted today. Had it come out 1 day later, nobody would believe the story was anything but an excuse for the headline.

Re:Timing Is Everything

[jonbryce]

It is April fools day in some parts of the world now.

Re:Timing Is Everything

[radtea]

It is April fools day in some parts of the world now.

Fortunately it isn't in the US yet, and I'm on vacation tomorrow and so will get to miss the boring tired old /. April 1st dementia that wasn't very funny the first time and has become vastly less funny as it gets repeated without variation or originality year after year after year.

Re:Timing Is Everything

[Anonymous Coward]

It is April fools day in some parts of the world now.

Fortunately it isn't in the US yet, and I'm on vacation tomorrow and so will get to miss the boring tired old /. April 1st dementia that wasn't very funny the first time and has become vastly less funny as it gets repeated without variation or originality year after year after year.

Thanks for deciding to not visit slashdot during a day with stories you find unfunny, instead of showing up here and commenting on every single story how they story sucks, and it's just not funny. You sir, have a life.

That said, slashdot decided to cater to those who had no life. Last year they didn't have April fool stories, and it was all real stuff. To people like me who actually had always enjoyed the April Fool's day off, it was disappointing (but no, I didn't go to every story to comment on how the story sucked and they should bring April Fools back).

Best domain how?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is such a valuable domain, why is it that no one has been able to do anything profitable with it, other than trade it around? Even if he doesn't think he can get a fair price for it at auction right now, surely he could call someone up and say "For $X/month, we can point this domain at your site, and I can stay out of bankruptcy."

Re:Best domain how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the people who were running the "site" are shysters who just wanted to steal investors' money and not do any work.

Glen Quagmire

[Anonymous Coward]

Giggity...

Bungle

[Archon-X]

This domain has been bungled every single time someone has owned it.
Either
a) corporate types get hold of if, and having no clue about the adult industry, make it a banner farm, or
b) Shady types get it and use it to suck Capital Investors dry.

Meanwhile on the rest of the internet, the pornographers are making more money of standard domains than one could ever hope to off sex.com
How do you make bank off 100M in a 5 year plan?

ZERO$

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that you posted it here, somebody on /. is going to register it and give it to his N-th generation offspring. You just screwed your own plan.

Search.com

[Enderandrew]

search.com > google.com
video.com > hulu.com and youtube.com
shopping.com > amazon.com

Honestly, having a common dictionary word as your domain name was assumed to be the key to internet success in the mid 90's, but haven't we moved on since then?

Branding, type in traffic, seo juice...

[canadian_in_beijing]

Why is it important? First have a look at Coke... their brand is worth millions if not billions. Same thing goes with domains and sex.com is on of the highest searched keywords ever on the intertet. Average Monthly Searches: 513,360,000 Average Cost Per Click: $0.51 USD. I happen to have a few domains with type in traffic and it's usually 0.5-3% type in traffic of the average searches. So with sex.com you are looking at large monthly checks from just type in traffic. Not everyone uses search engines to visit websites, and when returning to websites they will most likely type the domain in the address bar. People like to develop sites that have memorable, easy to type in, and easy to say domains (word of mouth). Sex.com is lots easier to remember compared to asianchicksgettingnailed.com. Website owners want customers to return and sex.com is one of the easiest and shortest sex names out there. Also getting top search engine rankings with Google, Bing, etc is lots easier if you have the keyword in your domain (not all cases but in highly competitive markets it will help). I don't think the domain is worth $100m but if properly developed it could be pulling in that amount of profit every year. My guess is a sale around $10m.

Just $100m ?

[mysidia]

Are they insane?

Sex.com is worth billions A bid for $100 million would be sort of a joke, an insult.

When you consider the number of visitors who will go there just due to the name, now, and the exponentially growing number of people who will visit the domain at times in the future (due to the increasing internet population)...

Not to mention the branding opportunities.

Although, I suppose at the end of the day, it can only be sold for as much as someone is actually willing to pay for it, regardless of its actual intrinsic value.

Its owner must've done something pretty bad if they went bankrupt while holding such a prized jewel though....

Re:Just $100m ?

[BitZtream]

No, people USED to go there just for the name. 10 years ago. Before everyone who went there found out that it wasn't what they wanted.

There are lots of one word domain names that would have been awesome had they not been ruined, but now they have.

Let me go over the short list on the top of my head of ruined names that no one gives a shit about anymore, including the owners of them:
ask.com
search.com
news.com
buy.com
toys.com

Most of those are still someone useable, but their actual value is trivial because they've been tainted by years of bad branding, bad service, major business failures and all the other things that happened when a bunch of idiots snapped up names trying to ride the wave.

The end result is that domains like these get sold over and over, for less money each time until someone with an actual business buys them rather than some startup without a chance in hell of lasting.

I'd wager he's have a hard time selling it for more than 50-100k USD.

If he gets lucky someone like the owners of the trojan brand or another condom maker or possibly another adult toy manufacture will take it, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Since '69

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean people actually pay for porn on the internet? C'mon, it's been available for free for as long as the internet has been around.

The Internet's been around since '69 don'tcha know?

Obligatory

[PPH]

Pics or it didn't happen.

On who?

[Snaller]

And is there 3. $$$$ profit?

If the domain was worth 100m

[BitZtream]

He wouldn't be having financial troubles.

The day of overpriced domain names is over. The good names are known, the ones that could have been good but were fucked up by douchebags squatting on them are long gone as they've already been ruined, people know to go elsewhere.

When you can go to Google, search for 'free porn' and get back www.pornhub.com as the first link, sex.com doesn't have a chance nor does it have any value, people looking for things it might have know its worthless to them and go elsewhere.

It'd take years to rebuild the brand with that domain.

Its value is nil, which is exactly why his business has failed. He ruined the name.

Re:Ok, but what we want to know is...

[tomhudson]

... On whom?

In Soviet Russia, sex.com goes down on YOU!

Too bad you're on slashdot instead of Soviet Russia.

Why hasn't it been sold?

[thetoadwarrior]

I can't believe it's so valuable and he rather just lose it and everything else he owns rather than sell it.