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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you suck. NONE of those links work!

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

[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.

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.

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.