BY ROB SALERNO – ICM Registry, owners of the soon-to-be-launched top-level “.xxx” domain, snagged a cool half-million dollars with the sale of the address “gay.xxx” to the Las Vegas-based company behind straight-college-jocks-in-hotel-rooms website CorbinFisher (NSFW, obviously).
The .xxx domain was created last year as a way of marketing porn sites but caused concern in the industry that the new domain could ghettoize porn and that governments could mandate companies to use the domain or block access to it.
The $500,000 sale is a record high for a domain in an extension that isn’t yet publicly available. I’m not sure where CorbinFisher got the money to pay for it — I’m not sure how anyone makes money on internet porn — although perhaps it was financed from expected revenues from copyright infringement suits the company is bringing against gay kids who torrent their video clips.
In other .xxx news, ICM Registry has preemptively blocked the registration of 15,000 celebrity names so as to prevent squatters from registering “beyonce.xxx” or “justinbieber.xxx”. The list of blocked names isn’t public, but The Register makes a good go of checking who’s on or off it.
If you’re still curious about the .xxx extension, visit ICM’s website, where no porn pun is too lame. Or maybe I’m seeing puns where they’re absolutely not intended:
“.xxx isn’t just coming, it’s here!”
“Don’t miss out, get yours today!”
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