Umm, yea… Talking about the one and only SEX.COM. The domain sold for something like $12 to $14 million as was reported in January of 2006 by DNJournal… It was funny to see SEX.NET sell only a couple of month’s later for a fraction of what SEX.COM sold for… It went for only $454,000 during a live auction held at a domain conference put on by Rick Schwartz in Las Vegas.

Gary Kremen of Grant Media sold both SEX.COM and SEX.NET in 2006 and moved onto other ventures. Things were really booming in the domain industry in 2006 and 2007…. The golden days. Lots of big deals were being put together both privately and publicly. This one 14 million dollar deal got lots of heads turning without a doubt.

I always thought that the partners who formed “Escom LLC” specifically to acquire SEX.COM under a joint venture type of deal overpaid big time and now it’s clear 100% that they did.  I am sure they had great plans and all, but here we are 4 years later and they got nowhere. A huge miscalculation and failure on their part.

Only burned through tons of cash and wasted a whole lot of time / resources. What a shame.. Definitely not the first time or last time that something like this will happen. Take for example Men.com which sold for $1.3m… What is it now? A banner farm. That is what happens with generic domains. They aren’t always all that great.

The partners / owners of SEX.COM are 1 year late on monthly payments due (domain purchase was financed) so it was announced just last month that this domain is going to be auctioned off as it was foreclosed by Domain Capital. Even though the domain gets around 40,000 – 50,000 unique visitors per day… The current owners see no value in them. They stopped believing in this domain

If you visit the current site, SEX.COM,  you will see why it is losing money and is hopeless. It just doesn’t have much going for it. So what that it’s possibly a category leading domain. So what that it has a ton of visitors… That doesn’t mean much! The problem that this domain has is that it’s too damn generic. HUGE PROBLEM!

If the domain is too generic, it’s very challenging trying to tie it up to a certain topic and develop it out right…. So what exactly can you tie up SEX.COM with??! Good question, eh! Something that nobody during the past 4 years was able to figure out. Also most of the traffic that this domain gets are unintentional type-ins from all of the sites that end in *sex.com which there are over 40,000.

People are looking for whateverSEX.com in the back of their mind but end up going to just SEX.COM . This happens quite a lot too, trust me on this… I’ve managed some very similar high trafficked generic gTLD and ccTLD domains for various clients as part of the Maxxximize.com domain monetization services we provide and this misdirected traffic isn’t all that great. Very hard to convert it. Sometimes it is absolutely worthless. That is right… I said it, WORTHLESS!

This is a cool domain, without a doubt… Worth a few million dollars, but not $14 million. It can do a lot for a company that will put it to good use and think long term because development always is. It’s a good investment and whoever acquires it next, they will be put on the map instantly. All of the free press will give them instant recognition and all of the credibility in the world to succeed in whatever it is they do… Whether they provide some kind of a service or sell products.

So with that said, probably somebody who isn’t all that well known right now in the SEX business (adult industry) will gather up all of their resources, maybe even partner up and try their luck by putting in a multi-million dollar bid during the foreclosure auction set to happen in NYC less than 10 days from today.

I see some people throwing around unrealistic figures, that it will sell for some $10m, $15m or maybe even $25m… LOL! That is highly unlikely to happen. This domain names’ value pretty much has decreased year-over-year by 10% – 20% at minimum. The adult business has also changed big time since 2006 so this domain isn’t all that great as far as running a standalone business goes. The only ones who made a killing with it were the previous owners in the early days, from 1995 to 2006.

Everybody who had anything to do with it the past four years have gotten nothing but headaches and that is because nothing good lasts forever.. YEP SEX.COM had a great run for exactly 10 years but that’s about it. Whoever pony’s up the cash next will have to be very creative in how they put this domain to use in order to turn in a profit at the end of the day. I can only think of a couple of business models that can possibly work; directory of sex sites, tube style, live sex cams portal or classifieds / personals mega site.

What do you think? What do you make of all of this… Lets hear it!