Get in quick, time is running out for the best online sex opportunity ever.

Well not really but the background story behind the sale of internet royalty, the domain www.sex.com is just more intriguing than the very boring links promoting website that is currently there.

Sex.com was put up for auction amongst much malarky in March 2010, with reports of this auction only just now appearing in the NZ blogs. Dig a little deeper and the story gets really complicated, but essentially the domain auction did not go ahead as further squabbling over the company continue.
Current owner Escom LLC reportedly paid $14 million for it a few years ago, but has since defaulted on loans, and been forced into bankruptcy.

Pays to fact check eh! The first article I read was from last week , making out that the auction was current. It appears not and a bit more research on Google reveals that the auction did not even go ahead and the domain sale was halted due to legal dramas over insolvency.

A bit more info on the story of this very famous domain name makes the history all the more interesting.
In the early days of the internet, when it would  have been really valuable, some random guy stole it from the real owners simply by sending a fake letter to the domain registry. The ensuing lawsuits ensured that people now have to actually check to see if such requests are vaguely legitimate, and the domain sat in limbo until it was irrelevant.

What is also important to note for any prospective bidders out there for  next time, key domains like this are still worth something, but not as much as before. The relevance of search engines these days means that a better search engine ranking will win hands down over a key domain name everytime. Research shows that most people will now use a search engine to access the internet even if they already know the domain name. For instance, instead of just typing sex.com into the search bar at the top of the browser, most people will use google and type it in there first.
As a rather large side issue to illustrate this point, Alexa.com, one of the world's most prominent ranking websites, lists Sex.com at a rank of 53,643. That means it is buried in a midst a pile of other sites. When you google "Sex" at google.com, sex.com does not appear within the first 100 hits, with things like the Sex Pistols fan site, and the Iowa Sex Offenders registry even appearing.

From the AFP article:

BERLIN (AFP) - The world's "most valuable" Internet domain name, sex.com, went up for grabs on Thursday having fetched 12 million dollars in 2006, a German firm handling the sale said on Thursday.

"It happens very rarely that an Internet address of this calibre goes on sale," Cologne-based Sedo said. "(The) sale of sex.com offers the new owner a unique opportunity to became market leader."

Sedo, which said it is the world's biggest trading platform for domain names, is selling sex.com on behalf of US firm Escom after creditors filed for insolvency protection, a joint statement said.

Other domain names have also changed hands for huge sums in the past, with vodka.com selling for three million dollars, kredit.de for 892,500 euros (1.1 million dollars) and poker.org for one million dollars, Sedo said.

"Owners of domains like this have a clear competitive advantage. Visitors land automatically on the websites of the owners just by entering what they are looking for. The listing in search machines is also improved," it added.