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

$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...

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

[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

[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: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.

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: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: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: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: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: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.