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22
Mar
2011

.XXX registrar expected to bring in $200 million a year

ICANN has officially approved the .xxx domain, and – in the process – will make a small Jupiter, FL-based, LLC into a money-minting tech giant. The contentious .xxx domain was conceived as a single destination for adult-themed Web sites. In addition to typing in sex.com to reach adult content, for example, surfers will soon be able to type in sex.xxx as well.

Its been a long strange trip to get to this point. Under CEO Stuart Lawley, ICM Registry LLC first tried to get ICANN to recognize .xxx as a domain seven years ago. ICANN shot down the bid claiming that there wasn’t “enough support in the adult-entertainment industry” for the domain (per BusinessWeek).

ICM Registry begged to differ, shelling out $6 million in legal fees to bring the case to arbitration. The end result is proof that – given enough time – the legal system can accomplish just about anything (no matter how many people oppose it). That’s all beside the point, though. The real point is there are probably a lot of champagne corks flying in Florida right now. Even if there’s no inherent need for .xxx domains, they’re still going to sell as adult web sites look to defend their brands, entrepreneurs start new sites on the domains and domainers move in to buy up keyword-rich domains out of the hopes that they can one day resell them.

Lawley estimated in June that his company could sell as many as 3 to 5 million registrations at $75 each for annual revenue north of $200 million. Think about that figure. That’s about half the revenue of publicly-traded bookseller, Books-A-Million, which operates 200 bookstores in 23 states! That somehow makes $6 million in legal fees seem like it’s worth it.

Already, ICM has received more than 200,000 applications for .xxx domains. That’s just 5 percent of the estimated 4.2 million pornographic sites floating about on the Web, according to the Financial Post, but it’s clear that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of new domain applications will follow. The ironic part is, most of the .xxx domains that get registered will probably languish in an unvisited corner of the Internet as Web browsers, parents and possibly ISPs block traffic to the domain out of the hopes of limiting access to adult material. ICM truly has figured out how to make money out of nothing.

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