Porn.com has just sold for $9 million, $5 million less than Sex.com took during a similar sale in January 2006.
That’s a bargain as porn.com is the better domain.
While sex.com gets more type-in traffic than porn.com, ’sex’ is a keyword used for all manner of searches whereas people searching for ‘porn’ are highly likely to be in the right target audience for adult websites. Unless there’s a better way to monetize an adult domain that pornography, the domains which draw the best qualified porn traffic are those with the most value. Ergo, porn trumps sex.
Porn.com’s new owners have said they’re in no rush and are waiting to come up with a strong idea for the site. The idea they should be exploring is screamingly obvious, they need to build a content site. The alternative, using Porn.com to push traffic to other people’s sites, guarantees they’ll make less in the long term as even if they’re paid 50% of revenue, by choosing not to build a content library they’ll have no assets to exploit in future or other media.
Their real dilemma should be deciding what kind of pay-site to build and I’d hope they don’t make the mistake of producing just another me-too subscription destination. Announcing a desire to become an ‘adult portal’ (how quaint, portals are so 1999.) doesn’t seem very smart but hey, who said spending $9M had to make you cautious?
As traditional adult models make less and less thanks to competition and web-models (torrents, social networking) which didn’t exist in the late nineties, it’ll be interesting to see how such significant investments are turned to profit.
(N.B. Don’t you wish you’d been a little geekier in 1994 and bought some of those primo domains yourself?)
Well, we missed the .eu landrush. But there is probarbly a niche still out there
Inhibitor - I’m not sure domains will ever offer the same opportunities but I’m sure there’s a technology brewing that’ll make all this seem quaint (my money’s on robots).