The site was often the pit of jokes and ridicule for so closely resembling the official White House website (whitehouse.gov), and it has no doubt caused the U.S Government a great deal of grief for being so closely aligned with a pornography site.
According to Daniel Parisi who bought the domain in 1997, after having a child he began to re-think his affiliations with porn.
Parisi told CNN.com that his main concern was what his preschool-age son might think about how his father makes money, and how that might play out on the schoolyard among his friends.
According to CNN, Parisi collects a leasing fee on the URL, which gets farmed out to a European company.
Whitehouse.com is also frequently mistaken for a website called Whitehousefoods.com, an applesauce company that has already expressed interest in purchasing the URL to save its customers from accidentally viewing porn. The company's parent, National Fruit Product Co., at one point took Parisi to court for trademark violation but lost.
"Our candidates are better looking and probably know more about the economy," is the paysite's tagline, which claims to reap in $1 million yearly in subscription fees.
An estimated two million users visit the site each month, including accidental visitations, which in some cases include children doing online research on the White House.
The site currently features a photo of presidential candidate John Kerry and a buxom blond in what appears to be a mock political debate. The website is cautious to warn viewers that it contains adult entertainment once the user passes the initial homepage. It also claims to have garnered attention from some of the top tier news organizations like Newsweek, NBC, and ABC.
The sale of Parisi's site comes at a time when URLs are going for top dollar. According to CNN, the web address men.com sold for $1.3 million in December 2003.
There has been no official word yet whether or not the White House is interested in purchasing the URL.
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