Domain names are basically the real estate of the internet. You’ve probably heard of high-value properties in Manhattan or London, but in the early 2000s, the most expensive piece of "land" wasn't made of bricks. It was a few letters long. The sex com old website isn’t just a piece of internet trivia; it’s a case study in legal warfare, massive greed, and the wild west era of the World Wide Web.
Honestly, it's a miracle the site even exists today given how many times it almost got nuked by lawsuits.
Most people looking back at the sex com old website think it was just a landing page for adult content. That’s partly true. But the business history behind it is way more interesting than the content itself. We’re talking about a domain that sold for $14 million in 2010 after a decade of legal battles that reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
It changed how we think about digital ownership. Permanently.
The heist that started it all
Back in 1994, Gary Kremen, the guy who actually founded Match.com, registered the domain. He saw the potential early. But then came Stephen Cohen. Cohen didn't buy the domain; he basically stole it through a forged letter sent to Network Solutions, which was the only domain registrar at the time. He claimed the company had been disbanded and he was the new owner.
Network Solutions didn't check. They just flipped the switch.
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Cohen turned the sex com old website into a literal gold mine. By the late 90s, he was allegedly making six figures a day in advertising revenue. It was pure profit. While Kremen was stuck in courtrooms trying to prove he was the rightful owner, Cohen was living it up in a Tijuana mansion.
It took five years for Kremen to get it back.
When he finally did, a judge awarded him a $65 million judgment against Cohen. Of course, Cohen fled to Mexico. The whole saga became a book called The [suspicious link removed] Chronicles by Charles Carreon. If you want to understand why the sex com old website matters, you have to realize it set the legal precedent that domain names are "personal property" subject to conversion laws.
Why the old design was so incredibly basic
If you saw a screenshot of the sex com old website from 2006 or 2008, you'd probably be underwhelmed. It looked like a Craigslist clone had a baby with an early version of Yahoo. It was a mess of blue links and low-resolution thumbnails.
There’s a reason for that.
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SEO back then was a different beast. The site didn't need to look pretty; it just needed to be a directory. It sat at the top of the food chain because of direct navigation. People didn't search for it; they just typed the URL into the address bar.
The 2010 Escom auction
By 2010, the company owning the domain, Escom LLC, was drowning in debt. They had bought the site from Kremen for roughly $14 million in 2006 (a record at the time), but they couldn't make the payments. This led to one of the most publicized auctions in tech history.
Sedo, the domain marketplace, handled the sale. Clover Holdings eventually won the bid for $13 million.
- It wasn't just a domain sale.
- It included trademarks.
- It included a massive amount of backlinked SEO juice.
- The buyer remained anonymous for a long time.
Business experts at the time, like those at Domain Name Wire, debated if it was actually worth that much. Think about it. Social media was rising. Apps were becoming a thing. Was a single domain name still worth tens of millions? The answer turned out to be "barely."
The shift from directory to social platform
The sex com old website eventually tried to pivot. You can't survive on direct type-in traffic forever once Google becomes the gatekeeper of the internet. The site attempted to become a "Pinterest for adults." They added user-generated content, boards, and social features.
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It was a desperate move to stay relevant.
The layout shifted from a static list of links to a masonry grid. It looked cleaner, but it lost that "old web" charm that made it famous. By this point, competitors like MindGeek (now Aylo) had already consolidated the market with tube sites. The massive price tag of the domain became a burden rather than an asset.
It’s hard to innovate when you start $14 million in the hole.
Lessons from the old-school domain era
What can we actually learn from the history of the sex com old website? First, that "Category Killer" domains are a hedge against changing algorithms. If you own the word, you own the traffic. But that only works if you actually build a brand on top of it.
- Security is everything. Kremen lost millions because a registrar didn't verify a single letter. Today, we have registrar locks and 2FA, but the vulnerability remains the human element.
- First-mover advantage is temporary. Being the first doesn't mean you'll be the last. The old site's failure to adapt to the "tube" era of video streaming meant it lost its crown to sites that had much "cheaper" domain names.
- Legal precedent is the real legacy. The lawsuits surrounding this specific URL defined how we treat digital assets today. Every NFT, every crypto wallet, and every premium domain owes a bit of its legal standing to the fight over this site.
It's sorta wild to think that a single URL caused a decades-long international manhunt and changed US property law.
If you're looking to dive deeper into the business of high-value domains, your first move should be checking the historical WHOIS data via tools like DomainTools or the Wayback Machine. Seeing the incremental changes in how the sex com old website presented itself—from a link farm to a social hub—reveals exactly how the internet's business model shifted from "location" to "engagement."
The next step for anyone interested in this space is to look at the recent sales of "AI" domains. We are seeing the same gold rush happen again. Except this time, the price tags are hitting the seven-figure mark in months, not years. Check out recent reports on Sedo or NameBio to see how the "[suspicious link removed]" model of owning the category is being applied to the artificial intelligence boom. It's the same play, just a different century.