Robin Wauters tracks down Clover Holdings Limited.
TechCrunch writer Robin Wauters has tracked down and interviewed the mystery buyer behind Clover Holdings Limited who paid $13 million for Sex.com last year.
But we still don’t know who the buyer is, as he asked TechCrunch to keep his identity secret for now. But he claims the site receives 125,000 visitors a day and should earn seven figures in a year as a parked page.
Those numbers seem lofty to me given how poorly the domain name performed for the previous owners. Surely they could have parked it and restructured debt payments to make it work if a simple parked page would earn seven figures in a year.
The new owner says he wants to take the site more mainstream because it opens up more possibilities and exit strategies for the site.
Read the story here.
Jeff Edelman says
If all you had to do was put up a parked page and get over a million dollars a year from doing that, surely the previous owners would have done so. The prior owners were experts in the domain field and would have known all about the different parking options.
Josh says
You know what makes me feel better about myself… that someone with the ability to pull a $13m trigger is just as smart as those who spend 13 dollars.
Just park it and make 7 figures…maybe and maybe that unicorn in my garage will be for sale one day. I bet if I offered it Id get calls 🙁
chris says
Im wondering if Robin chuckled a little when he said that – making 7 figures a year from being parked –
seems just a TAD bit unrealistic
Jonathan says
Very important that the support for the dot com is as strong as ever.
Einstein says
“The reason he doesn’t simply jump into the lucrative online porn industry? Because such an endeavor would close the door on other, more mainstream options, narrow down his exit possibilities – such as selling to a public company – and limit the ability to take the business public in the future, Jeff says.”
He is smart. Pfizer might not blink and buy the name. Just the initial press would be worth millions and millions
jp says
I believe the figures. Sometimes parking is just the best option. Ive seen something very similar before with another domain which unfortunately i can not mention. Others probably got greedy thinking they can develop it and make 20x as much, only to invest a ton of money into dev and kill the revstream for too long while increasing debt. Development ain’t always like shooting fish in a barrel, even if you have a killer domain.
Things the owner isn’t considering is that if he parks it he is 100% relyig on G or Bing, who control his daily paycheck for this single domain, on a contraversial topic. If they cut him from .20cents a click to .10cents then that takes his 1M a year to 500k. Now that’s if he is even making 20cents a click avg. Realistically he probably making like 6 cents (a lot of international traffic) so going from say 6 cents to 3 cents is only a 3 cent drop, but still a 50% cut in revenue on his single domain. Penny stocks can be dangerous, and given ooc trends we can doubt it will go up 3 cents a click any time soon from Y or G.
Again I have seen this situation play out before.
Adam says
Where’s Mike Mann ?? surely he knows if this is BS or not
Josh says
“Where’s Mike Mann ?? surely he knows if this is BS or not”
Ironic.
Joey Starkey says
Hard to beleive I am sure but I have girls so I stay out of the porn arena. But I took a trip to “sex(.) com” just now.
Typical parked page with a few cheesecake type photos. Just don’t see this page making $1 mill a year nor do I see it getting 125K type-ins a day. But what do I know?
Even at those figures its gonna take awhile to payback that $13 million
Joey Starkey
Memphis Domain Broker
jp says
@Joey
It’s possible, I’ve seen it before (albeit a few years ago)
It was a domain that had/has only a fraction of the daily traffic volume that sex.com has however made (at the time) half of the current claimed revenue of sex.com. Of course G and Y made some decisions that changed things and the revenue got knocked down super significantly, albeit still a massive amount of revenue for just 1 domain.
It’s very possible, and diversification is a good thing.
There are a handful of supermagical domains out there. I was fortunate to witness the power of one of them. Interestigly enough, this one experience is what eventually led me to be a domainer.
Nick says
22 rpm based on claimed traffic …..
Doesn’t seem too bad depending on how well it is optimized.
Andrew Allemann says
22 RPM for adult would seem really, really strong.
Nick says
@ AA
There are categories which even make 100 rpm on adult.
It all depends on what kind of traffic they generate.
jp says
@AA
It’s very easy to Maximize rpm on a superdomain like this, 22 may not even be maxed out.
It’s as simple as changing a keyword and waiting about 5 minutes to see firm and reliable results due to the traffic volume. You can try a different keyword or lander eevry 5 minutes for about an hour to before you have it maximized. The law of large numbers is a great thing. For every keyword there will be a different and predictable ctr and rpc (which only vary when outside factors such as Y or G change)
For mere mortal domains the traffic is rarely consistent enough to do something like this, and optimizing landers and keywords across an adult portfolio of the same volume of traffic ain’t exactly the same thing either, as each domain always has it’s differences, external factors can effect thedomains differently individually at different times, etc… And each domain individually is only receiving a relativly small volume of traffic.
The drawback to the superdomain is that it issuper vulnerable. Bummer of it gets banned for whatever reason etc… Single point of failure if you are going for the passive income approach.
The pro to the big portfolio is that it COULD POTENTIALLY be maximized to a higher rpm, however months of tracking and changing to achieve (only to later have to start all over again)
Nick says
Also, if they target a specific market thru a section of the site eg meet black singles types or chat, the rpm on that traffic can be as high as 200+