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

[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

[jav1231]

PolygamousRanchKid, you are a sick bastard! Beer?

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you suck. NONE of those links work!

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

[Civil_Disobedient]

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

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.

$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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

Oblig

[AndGodSed]

I guess they're screwed then.

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.

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

[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.

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!)

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.

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

[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.