Techconnect Magazine – Sex.com sold for $14 million — When I was doing Silicon Spin I had the art.com guy on and he told me he was proud to have spent a cool million for the domain name. These are names that any of us could have bought early on if we had any vision at all. Even as things progressed during the formative years at Cnet, Halsey Minor was buying names such as download.com and news.com for around $40,000 each. News.com has to be worth millions.
Smh.com.au today reported that the adult-only domain name sex.com has changed hands for the record sum of $US14 million ($18.71m).
The domain name, previously owned by entrepreneur Gary Kremen, has been snapped up by US company called Escom LLC.
Sex industry newsletter Xbiz reported the sale figure was $US14 million, almost double the price of the business.com domain name which sold in 1999 for $US7.5 million.
See! Sex sells!
Steve has a good point. An easy to remember name is nothing if your business model sucks. One name proves this: Pets.com.
Just think of the number of hits from people that input sex.com. It is like putting a store in an obvious place if it relates to sex of course. Plus you don’t have to type much or even save the url. You will even get people who are not computer savy.
Golf.com just got sold yesterday (the website and the company operating it). Could they have sold the company without the url golf.com? Maybe, but not as much or as easy.
Type in pc.com, guess where you go…Intel.
True, if your site sucks for any reason people will be gone in no time, no matter what the url is.
hmmm … could there be some inverse relationship between the desirability and descriptiveness of the URL to the success of the site. amazon.com, as was noted, has nothing to do with books google.com and yahoo.com are basically nonsense words and have nothing to do with search. but these sites succeed, while pets.com tanks.
Wonder is dvorak.com, et al. should be purchased now!
Steve, that could well be what it is – creators over-relying upon the fact that they have a ‘cool’ url. or maybe just shooting too much of their startup capital on it, so that other things are neglected.
and lets not forget eBay. I mean, talk about uncool – it sounds like pig-Latin!
XXX.com is a better name than sex.com.