Ready, set, everybody pretend not to know the first thing about Internet porn. Good. Now that you’ve got your innocence face perfected, you need to know that Porn.com just sold for $9.5 million, the largest cash amount ever paid for a domain in the history of the Sinternet.
Technically, Sex.com holds the record for most paid at a reported $12.5 million in cash and stock. But it should sell for more, considering most of them-there smut-seekers are still typing in “sex” into the search engines (assumedly – most assuredly if you ask them – a different group altogether from those typing in “google.com” in their search bars).
Porn.com, which currently has no porn on it – it links to lots of it – was bought by MXN Ltd. via a domain auction put on by Moniker.com. Don’t bother to search for MXN, as the results bring back little useful. If you keep up with the online porn world (of course, you don’t), MXN is company behind DownloadPass.com.
“The sale of Porn.com further reinforces the growing trend of businesses that place a high strategic value on generic domains related to their industry,” said Monte Cahn co-founder and chief executive officer of Moniker.com.
After an earlier target of $7.5 million was not met, Jay Westerdal, of the DomainTools Blog, still thinks Moniker got ripped off:
Domain auctions need to do a better job at getting the different industries bidding. If only professional domainers attend domain auctions, then sellers will only get the a multiple of PPC revenue for their domains. Great brand names will fail to sell at the level where they should be trading at.
Why so valuable? Westerdal notes that while searchers type “sex” into the search bar, the more intent and savvy voyeurs just go straight to the URL bar and type porn.com, making it the leading adult portal.
Porn.com pulls in up to $4,000 daily from 26,000 clickthroughs and an average of 50,000 unique visitors. And in case you missed it that the Web, as a whole, operates at about 28,000 pervs-per-second, adult content continues to be very much in demand.
Moniker has made a habit of brokering some prime domain real estate that people in the industry should have been quicker about snatching up. Other million-dollar exchanges have included Wallstreet.com and Autos.com.
On the auction block for the June meeting of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. in New York are some other properties that could bring a pretty penny, like naked.com and locals.com.
Kentucky businesses really missed the boat, apparently, on bourbon.com and horseracing.com, but at least we weren’t completely asleep at the wheel like the namesakes of Scotland.com and Amsterdam.com. Most likely there are some tourism boards mighty upset about these examples.
