The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that Hell.com will go up for sale today, Friday, October 27, 2006. Through some sort of live auction format, the domain is expected to draw bids of more than $1 million or so they say. The organizers of these type of auctions claim that the supposedly “hot” market for domain names is on the rise due to an increase in Internet advertising via search giants Google & Yahoo. Interestingly enough, Jim Bumgardner, owner of Heaven.com, says his ads on Heaven.com only get him around $5 or $6 per day.
At the same time, though, Sex.com sold for around $12 million earlier this year,
and the owner of Diamond.com apparently took in $7.5 million. So there do seem to be a few deep pockets floating around looking for specific names.
Of course, the owner of Hell.com, Kenneth Aronson, says that “Hell.com is one of the most powerful brands on
Earth.” He also claims that he won’t sell his 5,000-hits-per-day site for “less than several million dollars.” Whereas some appraisers, such as Zetetic.com, put Hell.com’s
value at a much more humble $625,600, comparing it to sales of domains with similar
attributes and traffic.
Oh, and one last thing worth mentioning, the owner of Heaven.com claims to receive several thousand emails daily at the address [email protected]. But being [email protected] doesn’t seem to be much of a lucrative business for him…
