sex.com for sale, but it’s not a domain deal

The owners of sex.com, which for many years was the highest-price domain sale ever recorded, have put the site on sale.

The unidentified sellers say they will accept minimum bids of $20 million, with at least $10 million up front, in an auction that began yesterday and will run until January 31.

The domain alone sold for $13 million in 2013, but this offer is for the full site, so don’t expect it to make it to any domain sales league tables.

The sellers say the site is an “innovative blend of popular social platforms”. That appears to mean it’s a blend of features borrowed from TikTok and OnlyFans.

In the name of journalistic integrity I checked it out.

The main page is basically a feed of short teaser videos of porn models posing or performing sex acts, accompanied by invitations to subscribe to their feeds for modest monthly subscription fees.

The site’s sellers say they receive 20% of the subscription fees, with the models taking the rest.

They say they get over a million daily unique visitors. Most appear to be to the legacy “pin” business, which allows users to create collections of porn content, the site’s primary business prior to July 2021.

Interested bidders can sign up at sex.com/auction.

Update: when tweeting a link to this post, I discovered Twitter won’t allow links to sex.com (which Twitter had auto-linked from the headline) because it thinks the site is “potentially harmful”.

sex.xyz sells at $11,000 loss as premium renewal kicks in

The domain sex.com was for many years the most-expensive ever sold, but the outlook might not be so bright for sex.xyz, which may be a bit of a poisoned chalice.

sex.xyz sold at Sedo for $2,150, according to a record that popped up in my feed today. Namebio lists the same price, with a sale date of December 15.

The domain appears to have been sold just one week before it came up for renewal, which would have cost the original registrant an eye-watering $13,000.

According to XYZ, the registry, it had sold in December 2021 for $13,000, and is one of the names listed as having an annual premium renewal the same as the original sale price.

sex.com sold for $13 million in 2006 and held the record for the highest publicized domain sale every, until the crypto guys started throwing their money around a few years back.

The current record is $30 million for voice.com, sold in 2019. The name nfts.com sold for $15 million last year.

Update: this post was updated to correct that it was sex.com that sold for $13 million, not xyz.com.

Sex.co for sale at $200,000

Remember when sex.com sold for $13 million?
The owner of sex.co, which according to Whois is Amsterdam-based Quattro Media Co, has put the domain on the market with a buy-it-now price of $200,000.
That’s according to Heritage Auctions, which says it is managing the sale.
There are no buyer’s fees associated with the offer, HA said in an email blast.
Given there’s only one letter difference between sex.com and sex.co, you’d imagine that the .co benefits from a fair bit of typo traffic. The domain is currently parked.
For sale at less than 2% of the price that sex.com went for back in 2010, would $200,000 be a bit of a bargain?

Sex.com relaunches as Pinterest for porn

The world’s most valuable domain name has gone all Web 2.0.
Sex.com, which sold for $13 million in 2010, officially relaunched today as the “Pinterest for Sex”, a social networking site for sharing porn.
I must confess I had no clue what “Pinterest” was until ten minutes ago. According to Wikipedia, it’s one of the world’s biggest social networking web sites, bigger than LinkedIn
Perhaps my ignorance can be excused. According to Sex.com’s press release, I’m not the demographic:

Analytics have indicated that women make up over 97% of accounts created on Pinterest. Because of its specific audience, most pictures are of weddings, decorations, recipes and fashion, which seem to be of very little interest to men.

Sex.com is about sharing images of porn, therefore. Man stuff.
I believe this will be the first time the domain name sex.com has been properly “developed” in this way.

Will a Russian domain sell for more than Sex.com?

The scandal-hit Russian domain name market may yet produce some of the most expensive domain name sales of all time. Premium .рф generics are already attracting eight-figure bids.
Bids of $10 million have apparently been placed on at least two domains, квартиры.рф and бетон.рф (apartments.rf and concrete.rf), in the controversial quasi-landrush auction managed by RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar.
IDNblog.com is reporting the apartments.rf asking price, and a reader was kind enough to send me a screenshot of the concrete.rf auction.
If these bids are for real, and these auctions were to close, they would immediately occupy the number two and three slots on the league table of all-time biggest-ticket domain sales
Before sex.com sold for $13 million, DNJournal’s top twenty list had fund.com in the top spot, at $9,999,950, followed by porn.com at $9,500,000 and diamond.com at $7,500,000.
The RU-Center auctions may not close, however.
As I reported yesterday, the registrar and five others are being investigated on antitrust grounds by Russian competition authorities, after allegedly registering tens of thousands of domains to themselves.
The auctions are currently frozen and the .рф registry, Coordination Center for ccTLD, has made noises about applying “sanctions” to the registrars that could include de-accreditation.
RU-Center, which confusingly does business at nic.ru, has defended its position in at least two articles here and here (in Russian, naturally).
As far as I can tell, none of these auctions will close until the registrar and the registry resolve their differences and/or the Russian government probe concludes.
However, it’s pretty obvious that the demand for Cyrillic generic IDNs is enormous in Russia, and could easily challenge .com on the big-sale league tables.

Sex.com to sell for $13m

Sex.com is set to be sold for $13 million, after Sedo managed to find a buyer from among about a dozen bidders.
I reported the story for The Register today.
The buyer is Clover Holdings Ltd, based in St Vincent. The deal is subject to approval by the California bankruptcy court that is overseeing the assets of Escom, the current owner.
Go read the story. Or, if you’re interested in more detail, here’s the motion Escom filed this week, which includes the sales contract as Exhibit A (pdf).

Sex.com sale gets September 28 deadline

The private sale of sex.com will close by September 28, Sedo announced today.
I believe this is the first time the company has put a hard deadline for a deal to be made. It’s been handling the sale since May.
The company is still soliciting buyers, which makes me wonder whether it’s struggling to find a buyer with sufficiently deep pockets.
Sedo director of sales Kathy Nielsen said in a press release:

Sex.com has a proven revenue model that will enable its next owner to quickly build on past success. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a domain that will instantly expand the visibility of a brand, position a company as a leader in its market, and generate tremendous natural traffic.

The company has previously told buyers that they need to stump up a $1 million deposit in order to enter negotiations.
The last time the storied domain changed hands, the price tag was a cool $14 million.

Sex.com writer Kieren McCarthy buys sexdotcom.com

If you’ve written a book called Sex.Com, what domain name do you use to promote it?
For former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy, the answer to that question is now sexdotcom.com, which he has just picked up for a bargain $360 in a Sedo auction.
He has previously promoted Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet’s Crown on sexdotcom.info, but says it makes more sense to use the .com.
The book, which is very entertaining, chronicles the fight for control of sex.com between original registrant Gary Kremen and the conman Stephen Cohen, who stole it in the mid-1990s.
McCarthy tells me he’s had some Hollywood interest in his story, so his new domain could turn out to be a worthwhile investment.

DNS is sexy? Dyn thinks so

Dynamic Network Services has launched a marketing campaign aimed at convincing people that DNS is “sexy”.
The company, which provides managed DNS services as Dyn.com, evidently has its tongue in its cheek, but has plastered the “DNS is Sexy” slogan across its web site anyway.
It has even registered DNSisSexy.com to bounce users to its corporate pages.
There’s a list of ten reasons why this frankly bizarre proposition might be true, including:

7. Standard features like DNSSEC on our Dynect Platform defend you from would be cyber criminals that want to steal your important information online. Bye bye identity theft!

Feeling sexy yet? Me neither.
How about:

9. Recursive DNS like our free Internet Guide, can protect your family and friends from unwanted Web content with customized defense plans.

Feeling sexy now? No?
Still, Go Daddy managed to mainstream domain name registration by incorporating boobs quite heavily in its TV campaigns, and everybody is interested in the ongoing sex.com and .xxx sagas, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Dyn could do the same for managed DNS.
To be honest, I can’t quite visualise it.
Dyn is asking people to tweet their reasons why DNS is “sexy” including the hashtag #dnsissexy. I’ve done mine.

Sex.com auction postponed for online bidders

The auction of Sex.com, which was due to happen in New York on Thursday, has been postponed and the auctioneer is now accepting online bidders.
Maltz Auctions, which is handling the sale, posted a link to a ProxiBid.com page and the slogan “Online Bidding Available – Call for Details!”, neither of which were there last time I looked.
ProxiBid describes itself as “the World’s #1 provider of live webcast auctions”. The service webcasts and allows remote users to bid on live, in-person auctions.
The company press released its Sex.com coup on Friday.
You’ll still need to put $1m into escrow in order to bid.
It appears that legal action may be the reason for the postponement.
The ProxiBid page still reflects the March 18 date.