Let’s talk about sex.com

I’ve been thinking about selling sex, recently. Not my own, as the aim would be to generate money, not mirth. Instead, I was thinking about the sale of sex.com, the controversial domain that has been wrestled out of more hands than bouquets at weddings. This year the sex.com domain sold for $12m – that’s a lot of sex.

It is not difficult to see where the value lies. Such generic domains can be big business, and sex is a term that a lot of people look for on the interweb. So, if you own that domain you are guaranteed more clicks than the keep-fit instructor at an old people’s home hears during a warm-up. It’s no wonder that it was stolen, fought over, and then thrown at the mercy of the courts.

Twelve million dollars is enough to get me interested, and as a result I am considering registering a load of similar domains, albeit spelled out phonetically.

In my potential roster I have secks.com, sekks.com, and er, sachs.com, but the latter is a fan site for the diminutive Spanish waiter-playing actor. When I last looked, the official Sachs site had fewer visitors than I did when I had that flesh-eating virus, so whether a new one is needed is doubtful.

Of course, I should try to think of my own generic terms to register, but if sex.com has gone, along with news.com, diy.com, monkeys.com, and others, is there anything else worth investing in?

You see, last month a herd of potential online cash cows were auctioned off. Domain names under the hammer included cameras.com, auction.com, babies.net and creditcards.net, all of which sold like hot cakes that had been hand rolled on the thighs of Cuban ladies.

Cameras.com sold for a whopping $1.5m, while flowers.mobi raised some $200,000 – or, if you prefer, the price of a dozen red roses in February. Of the domains up for grabs, just a few, including hell.com, didn’t sell, possibly because it had a very high reserve, or because it’s a destination that no one really wants to visit.

Putting a value on a generic domain is a bit of a dark art. For every cash cow, there’s a mangy old nag, but even these can take traffic away from businesses because of the way some people use the internet – by entering a generic term into the address bar.

So, when it comes to registering domains, firms no longer just have to consider what suffix to use, but also what other terms might relate to their business. These could run into the thousands.

It won’t be long until firms turn to specialists to make sure that they are registering all they can, where they can. This may be an unwelcome complication, but if you want to be the master of your own domains, it’s a necessary one.