Crazy Expensive Web Site Names

Sex.com

No word occupies as much space in our brains as sex, so naturally when it comes to domain names, Sex.com is pretty much 24-karat gold. The rights to the name will be auctioned off Thursday for a starting bid of $1 million. But that’s just part of the story.

According to The Telegraph, an entrepreneur named Gary Kremen first purchased Sex.com back in 1994, but a year later, the name was wrestled from him in a complicated scam and he spent five years fighting to get the rights back. In 2006, he sold the site for $14 million, which was the record at the time. Now it’s being sold again, and some speculate it could break the record this time around as well.

You might ask if the site is really worth all that trouble? Well, according to one expert, the site generated as much as $15,000 a day at its peak from visitors.

Photo Credit: Sex.com

Insure.com

This one takes the cake. Last year, Insure.com sold its name and assets to marketing firm QuinStreet Inc. for a reported $16 million. The domain name had originally been purchased back in 2001 for $1.6 million. That’s a pretty steep increase, but then again, Insure.com is a hell of a lot better than Quinstreet.com, no offense.

Photo Credit: Insure.com

Beer.com

The only surprise here is that sex and insurance are more valuable than beer. Bill Fisher, a Web developer, owned this domain name, as well as other boozey site names like Guinness.com and Budweiser.com. In 2004, he sold Beer.com to Interbrew for $7 million. It’s now a search hub for all things beer.

Photo Credit: Beer.com

Pizza.com

Chris Clark, a software entrepreneur, purchased the domain name Pizza.com back in 1994 for just $20 or, you know, the price of an actual pizza pie. He kept the site for more than a decade, but did nothing with it until 2008 when he noticed a couple of other sites (some on this list) were selling for millions. He put the site name up for sale and was eventually able to sell it for $2.6 million.

Photo Credit: Pizza.com

Porn.com

If the value of our domain names says anything about the values we hold as a society, we are clearly all a bunch of perverts. Porn.com was bought for $9.5 million back in 2007 by MXN Ltd, a company that also owns high class sites like Pimproll.com. I don’t think we need to tell you what kind of content these sites have.

Photo Credit: Porn.com

Candy.com

And now for something a bit more wholesome… Last year, Candy.com was purchased for $3 million by G&J Holdings. According to TechCrunch, the company justified the large price tag with the explanation that there are nearly a million searches every month for the word ‘candy.’ That’s a lot of opportunity for natural traffic. Candy.com now bills itself as the “largest online bulk candy store.”

Photo Credit: Candy.com

Business.com

Back in 1999, eCompanies bought the Business.com domain name for $7.5 million. A couple of years later, CNET asked the owner of eCompanies whether it was worth that much money and he confessed that it wasn’t at that point, but that he believed it would be “over the long haul.” It sounded overly optimistic at the time, but the company eventually sold the domain name and the business itself for a massive $350 million. To be fair, it’s unclear how much of that was for the Web site name and how much was because the site itself had been turned into a lucrative business directory.

Photo Credit: Business.com

CreditCards.com

In 2004, ClickSuccess, a small marketing firm in Austin bought the rights to CreditCards.com for $2.75 million. At the time, the company’s CEO told MSN that he was ecstatic with his purchase. “"It's like prime real estate, there's only so much of this real estate to go around. I feel like we bought a slice of Park Avenue,” he said. The site is currently a portal to find news and information about credit cards in general.

Photo Credit: CreditCards.com

Seniors.com

In 2007, Seniors.com was auctioned off for $1.8 million. It’s now a site devoted to helping seniors find new relationships.

Photo Credit: Seniors.com

Poker.org

It may not be a dot-com site, but put poker in any name and it’s bound to be worth something. Poker.org sold to PokerCompany.com for $1 million, the most ever spent on a .org domain. That shouldn’t be too surprising though since most .org sites tend to be educational and well, boring, to be honest.

Photo Credit: Poker.org

Country Names

It’s not just product names that make for lucrative domains, several country names have also proven very marketable (since they presumably come with a built-in audience.) In 1999, Korea.com sold for an impressive $5 million; not to be outdone, Israel.com sold for $5.88 million in 2008. So what about the good ol’ U.S. of A? Well, apparently America.com went on the auction block in 2008, and was expected to sell for record amounts of $12 million or more. But somehow, the highest bid was just $1.71 million. That’s a bummer.

But America.com was not the only surprise flop in the domain name market…

Photo Credit: Israel.com

Big Name Failures

It may seem easy to figure out the formula for what sells and what doesn’t. But not all big, obvious names end up selling for crazy sums. Blogging.com sold for just $135,0000, JewishDeli.com sold for just $9,000 and TelevisionShow.com sold for $35,000.

Photo Credit: Blogging.com

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