One of the most valuable domain names on the internet is up for
sale with an asking price of $85 million. Its current owner, who
won the name from its previous owner in a recent court decision,
once said he might use the name as a portal for women’s issues but
now describes the address as “a licence to print money.”
Gary Kremen of San Francisco, who registered the name in 1994,
lost the name the following year to an ex-convict, Stephen Cohen,
after Cohen sent a forged letter of transfer to Network Solutions,
the domain registrar. Cohen then ran a highly profitable porn
portal until late last year when a court awarded Kremen the return
of the domain name having found that the forged signature on the
letter to Network Solutions misspelled Kremen’s name.
The word “sex” is the first or second most searched for word on
the internet, according to the statistics of many search engines
which frequently show “sex” and “mp3” at the top of their charts.
Sex.com was rumoured to make Cohen's business annual revenues of
around $100 million. Its hit rate was said to be 25 million per
day.
The marketing of the domain name has been licensed by Kremen to
German site Domshop.de. To date, the highest price known to have
been paid for a domain name is $7.5 million for Business.com.
AsSeenOnTV.com is said to have sold for $5 million.
