
Sex.com sells for $13m - ssclafani
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/20/domain_name_sale/
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wallflower
Of all the ways to make money with a time machine, registering a handful of
generic keyword domains would have been the easiest.

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Dramatize
I kept telling my parents back in '99 that they should buy domain names.

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yosho
it's sad that even though the domain is worth so much, people simply still
just put advertising on it.

C'mon, give us a decent sex site at least. Just sayin.

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kls
Personally if I where to purchase it, I would make it a high end lifestyle
magazine. In between the old GQ, Bazaar and Robb Report. The branding for that
is phenomenal. Not worth 13 mil though.

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brc
I was watching some documentary on TV about an online porn company, and they
were talking about several billion page views. It was one of the youtube
knockoffs. All served up, for free. The guy said it was the best way to
advertise and the site made money, i'm assuming through affiliate links. I've
no idea how you serve up billions of page views (presumably with heavy
photo/video content) and still make money. The conversion rates must be high.

The porn side of the internet is something people rarely talk about, but they
must have some sharp developers working on some really tricky scaling
problems.

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olegkikin
It's mostly static content, I assume. They probably just use a CDN. It's
relatively easy to scale when you don't have dynamic stuff.

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brc
They had their own server farm. The issue they had was that most 'mainstream'
companies don't want to have anything to do with them.

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Terretta
We manage hosting for a number of complicated traffic sites, including this
one... It's curious to see court processes reported in the news so fast.

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vchien
Insure.com – Sold for $16,000,000 in Oct 2009 to QuinStreet Fund.com –
$9,999,950 – Sold in 2008 Porn.com - Sold for $9,000,000 sometime in 2007
Business.com – Sold for $7,500,000 in 1999 Diamonds.com – Sold for $7,500,000
Beer.com - Sold for $7,000,000 Casino.com – $5,500,000 – Sold to a private
company in 2003 Slots.com – $5,500,000 – Moniker auction May 2010 Toys.com
$5.1M sold to Toys R Us AsSeenOnTV.com – Sold for $5,100,000 in January of
2000

See more...updated May 14, 2010 [http://www.fka200.com/2009/01/03/a-list-of-
some-of-the-top-d...](http://www.fka200.com/2009/01/03/a-list-of-some-of-the-
top-domain-name-sales-ever-most-expensive-domains/)

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akira410
An old acquaintance of mine owns at.com. I can't help but wonder how much that
would go for....

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wmf
Can I reach him at at@at.com?

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pak
It's certainly not a domain amenable to saying email addresses out loud. "At
what dot com?"

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lpolovets
The domain has a fascinating history that is well-documented:
[http://www.amazon.com/Sex-com-Domain-Twelve-Brutal-
Internets...](http://www.amazon.com/Sex-com-Domain-Twelve-Brutal-
Internets/dp/1905204663)

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danielrhodes
That domain really gets around :-P

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amadiver
I expected that number would be much higher.

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dennisgorelik
See also: <http://www.quantcast.com/sex.com>

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stevenp
At first I was surprised that the traffic has tanked so much for sex.com,
because I figured every teenager would enter it into the browser because it's
so easy to think of. But when I went to Google (even with safe search off) and
type "sex", all of the matches are for Sex and the City. My guess is that it's
probably pretty hard to get much SEO traction for the word "sex".

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flipbrad
Does a domain name sale attach capital gains tax? because it really must be
monstrous, if so. Can't imagine that many exemptions apply, and assuming the
value at purchase was ~$10... or is it not that kind of asset?

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alecco
DNS was a terrible idea. So hierarchical and monopolistic. So full of flaws.

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jncraton
It's not a perfect solution, but it certainly beats passing around big
hostfiles mapping hosts to addresses.

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Asdfg
Hostfiles are probably better in the long term than government control of DNS
servers. Censorship at the DNS level is one of the low-hanging fruit of
dictatorships.

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jdp23
well you know what they say ...

sex sells.

