Monday, Oct 17, 2011    Text size: 

LOS ANGELES — DomainMonster.com has lowered its .XXX price point for those companies purchasing 25 or more domains.

The $79.99 per-domain fee has dropped to $74.99 for .XXX domains in the General Availability stage, according to Matt Mansell, DomainMonster's CEO.

Mansell told XBIZ that the $74.99-per-domain rate applies when customers order online more than 25 units — not years — of product.

"That could be 25 single-year .XXX domains at General Availability, it could be 10x single-year .com domains and 15x .XXX single-year domains (totaling 25 units) or it could be 3x 10-year registrations for .XXX domains (totaling 30 units)," Mansell said. "Basically the bigger the basket, the lower bracket everything falls into."

Mansell, who said that his company has seen 25,000 .XXX pre-orders for the General Availability stage that begins in December,  noted more online adult operators should realize that .XXX is a reality and not going away, and that inaction over scooping up domain names could be detrimental to their businesses.

"Strikes me the adult industry's going to be playing catch up on the .XXX launch when it will be too late," Mansell told XBIZ. "It's in the root, its real.

"The industry is at a real risk of the wider general public stealing their space; they need to engage now."

But Diane Duke, who leads the industry trade group Free Speech Coalition, said adult operators should be wary of .XXX and that confusion, at the end of the day, reigns.

"We are hearing story after story of folks who have applied and have either not received any information concerning the status of their site and many who applied and have been rejected and have lost their money," Duke told XBIZ.

"This process is extremely cumbersome and confusing for adult companies wishing to block or defensively purchase their domains. That confusion seems to be paying off for the registrars and ICM in profit the nonrefundable registration fees, even when no actual registration has taken place.

"My work now is to expose the truth through the smoke and mirrors that ICM and some of its less scrupulous registrars have created to keep them from making a quick buck through non-refundable registration fees at the expense of the industry."