Sex.com for sale

Sex.com will be sold at auction next week. Current owner Escom LLC reportedly paid $14 million for it a few years ago, but has since defaulted on loans. According to CNN, "The auction is set for March 18 in New York, and bidders are required to appear with a certified check for $1 million to participate."

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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hamletsdead

Am I missing something? Or isn’t this the the much-maligned sex.com that was stolen from the original owner by some porno wannabe who wrote a letter to the domain transfer agent saying it was actually his URL, and it was transferred to him, and then he moved to South America and there was protracted litigation involving forged documents which ended in an uncollected judgment against him (aside from an over-mortgaged house)? How can this not be the most ubiquitous porno funnel of all time?
fnc

bianca.com was where you found the actually interesting content.
foobar

This is exactly why domain names should not be saleable. This one is valued higher than anyone could reasonable make use of it, so it just gets held by squatters.
eliterrell

Forget about most valuable, that has to be about the most underexploited domain around. I guess people just buy it as an investment to resell rather than having a clear idea of what to do with it. I just went there for the first time and after 2 minutes I don’t see why anyone would go there more than once. The homepage consists of ‘sexy’ stock photos. The store appears to just sell branded clothing. There are supposedly classifieds but I didn’t bother looking. There’s no way they’re as entertaining as Craig’s List.
Joe

It was once thought that domains like this would be hugely valuable, because those were the pre-Google days when search engines didn’t work that well. People thought that the most valuable names would be generic words followed by .com, because everyone would type those words and land on those sites. And at one time, things worked that way; if you absent-mindedly typed “sex” in your location bar, you’d land on sex.com. Now you land on a Google/Yahoo/Bing/Baidu search for “sex”, meaning that sex.com isn’t worth so much any more.
Darcy Casselman

I’m pretty sure that Escom LLC is the company that bought the Amiga computer in the 90s and utterly failed to capitalize on that too.
Nadreck

A very famous domain name. In the early days of the internet, when it would have been really valuable, some random guy stole it from the real owners simply by sending a fake letter to the domain registry. The ensuing lawsuits ensured that: people now have to actually check to see if such requests are vaguely legitimate; and the domain sat in limbo until it was irrelevant.