Poker.com Domain Sale a Bust?
As Gambling911.com has been reporting for the past few weeks, it appears that the silent auction of the domain name Poker.com may not have gone through according to plan. While a verbal offer of $27 mil was reportedly thrown out there, a written commitment for $22 mil seemed the more likely of the two options. But a third option of "no deal" may be the ultimate ending to this most unusual of sagas.
We first reported on the bizarre and criminal history of those first involved with the Poker.com domain name.
Poker.com was a terribly mismanaged domain name from the get go when it first arrived on the scene.
Charlo Barbosa, a Vancouver, Canada, man started publicly traded Poker.com Inc. before being accused of selling online porn services via software that charged unwitting long-distance subscribers as much as $7.39 a minute. The Federal Trade Commission sued and won a settlement stopping the practice.
Gambling911.com sources now reveal that paper work required of the Poker.com domain name holders apparently had not offered proof of ownership. Some within the online gambling sector suggest that the Poker.com name is actually being leased out by a group that had not authorized it being auctioned off.
With all the hoopla surrounding generic domains and their value, some of the greatest cyber success stories involve businesses whose names employ some degree of imagination without mention of the actual sector they are involved in: Google.com, eBay.com, Monster.com, Bodog.com, Yahoo.com, Napster.com, Expedia.com, GoDaddy.com, just to name a few.
And one of the biggest of the non-generic names is Amazon.com.
A reference made in DomainDaddy .co.uk:
Though generic names can't be trademarked, are sources of controversy and usually unavailable (if not, costly), your prospective domain name could sound of the genre of women.com, Hotels.com, Furniture.com, Art.com and shoes.com. Nonetheless, the loss of uniqueness in generic names is a serious reason for their unpopularity among namers. Now guess why Amazon was'nt named book.com and ebay not auction.com.
Of course there are your Sportsbook.com's and Hotel.com's as well, though many would argue that these success stories are just as much about a bright innovative management team as they are about a powerful easily recognizable domain name.
Then there is Porn.com, which a few weeks ago snatched up an amazing $9.5 mil.
Detroit-based Internet media investor MXN Ltd. is the buyer of what could be the largest cash sale of an Internet domain name ever, with the acquisition of high-traffic site porn.com.
Florida-based online domain reseller and auction house firm Moniker.com - the same group overseeing the Poker.com auction - confirmed they brokered the sale from an undisclosed seller to MXN.
Moniker.com CEO Monte Cahn told Crain's that the sale, now complete, is the highest single transaction his firm has ever handled and may be its highest cash-only sale ever. In price, it ranks behind sex.com, which changed hands in 2005 for $12 million in cash and stock options.
âThat domain might be higher in Web traffic, but we think this one is higher in converted Web traffic, or the visitors who will click again and explore the services and options there,â he said.
Porn.com is maintained as what Cahn called a âlinguistically driven parking site,â or a place that collects many keyword hits, but it is expected to take on a new form when MXN assumes management.
Crain's could not learn details of MXN's ownership at press time. MXN Ltd. is affiliated with similar online adult sites like download pass.com and pimproll.com, according to ComputerWorld and Cahn.
MXN's attorney, Steve Cheifetz in Windsor, returned a call but would not comment.
âThe possibilities with porn. com are limitless. To rush its development just to get something brand new "live' would be foolish,â said a statement released on MXN's company site this week. âWe will carefully evaluate our options before we decide the direction we wish to take it.â
And while Poker.com may be a lucrative name, "Online Poker" is the single most searched term on the Internet today, toppling "Online Porn" last year. When people talk of Internet success stories as they relate to domain names, nobody can look to OnlinePoker.com and say this is anything other than a website that probably derives a decent amount of traffic from search, but hardly comes close to meeting its maximum profit potential as a full-service business venture.
Interestingly enough, a search query of "Online Poker" on Google does not even turn up OnlinePoker.com within the first page of results, nor the second page for that matter. Poker.com appears at number 18 though.
Source
. Hopefully he'll do well with his newest acquisition. The world's getting smaller every day it seems, hehe.
