Sex.com Sold to Escom LLC For $14M

By Gretchen Gallen

Wednesday, Jan 18, 2006 Text size:

SAN FRANCISCO – The infamous and controversial domain Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million, XBiz has learned.

Sex.com owner Gary Kremen was unavailable for comment, but a source from Kremen’s company, Grant Media, told XBiz that sales for the famous domain name will still be handled through Grant Media’s San Francisco offices.

While other terms of the acquisition remain unknown, XBiz was able to locate information on the deal through a company called InternetRealEstate.com, which shares office space in Boston with Domain Name Acquisition Group (DNAG), a company that was involved in a lawsuit surrounding the Sex.com domain in September.

InternetRealEstate.com is owned by Internet Real Estate Group LLC Partners, which has been involved in the acquisition, development and sale of domain names like Beer.com for $7 million, Telephone.com for $2 million, Shop.com for $3.5 million, and others such as Computer.com, College.com, Diamond.com, Timeshares.com and CreditCard.com.

A principal of InternetRealEstate.com told XBiz that his company has nothing to do with Escom and has no affiliations with DNAG either, although the company President Andrew Miller and CEO Peter Hubshman were both named as defendants in the DNAG/Sex.com lawsuit and both names appear on the InternetRealEstate.com website.

InternetRealEstate.com’s former name, Deal Jam LLC, also was named in the Sex.com lawsuit, before it became known as Internet Real Estate Group.

The company principal said that while he was aware of the Sex.com sale to Escom, he denied any affiliations between InternetRealEstate.com and the new owner of the Sex.com domain name.

Prior to learning of the sale of Sex.com, numerous adult industry message board postings had already begun speculating on the sale after noticing the radical change in the appearance of the Sex.com website. On the homepage of the updated website, the new owners refer to the site as “the new Sex.com,” and the appearance is radically different from the former site. The site is copyrighted by Escom.

Kremen has been shopping around the Sex.com domain for the past year. In previous interviews with XBiz, he has expressed interest in getting out of the adult business.

The Sex.net domain is still registered under Kremen's Grant Media company.

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