from www.metro.co.uk – The news that Adult.co.uk’s owners have decided to put it up for sale comes in the wake of the extremely lucrative sale of Sex.com last October for a whopping £8.2million.
While there’s no chance that Adult.co.uk will fetch anywhere near that much, it’s still likely to be a reasonably tidy money spinner – visiting the site right now shows that for the time being it’s also available for lease at a cost of over £5,000 per month.
The site’s owners are a company called Web Sites Limited, who run the domain leasing service domains.co.uk – which, somewhat bizarrely, has its registered address at a homelessness charity in Preston.
A spokesman said that the only relationship between the domain firm and the charity was that they shared a director in common – and that they’d decided to sell off some of their ruder domains because they’d got cold feet about being associated with the world of porn.
‘We decided to move away from any adult-themed ventures. But hopefully that domain could be very lucrative for someone who’s happier to work in that space,’ the spokesman said.
Unlike Sex.com, which has a long and tortuous history involving multiple owners, numerous court battles, identity fraud, and bankruptcy, Adult.co.uk hasn’t been up for sale once since it was registered in 1996.
Indeed for most of its life, it hasn’t even been used for anything at all – the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine reveals that it sat empty for over ten years until in 2007, when it briefly turned into a porn site for about a year.
Charmingly, its sellers tried to suggest that it could end up being used for something other than erotica – pointing out that it ‘could be used for a variety of sectors, including sex, relationships, or a humour website.’
They added: ‘Sex.com was such a huge success when it went on sale last year and this has shown just how powerful a premium domain name can be for a business and how high the demand can be. A domain name like Adult.co.uk is very clear, concise and, most importantly, best in class for its related sector.’