Who on earth would pay $1 million for hell? By Lisa Baertlein, AP writer
No one was buying hell on Friday -- or at least its red-hot Web address.
HELL.com was among hundreds of Internet domain names up for auction in Hollywood, Florida, by domain asset management provider Moniker.com, a unit of marketing services firm Seevast Corp.
The owner put a minimum price of $1 million on the underworld's domain, confident of high interest after the salacious address, Sex.com, sold for about $12 million earlier this year. But there were no takers with bids failing to reach the reserve price.
"The world is still alive and well. Nobody is going to hell right now," Seevast Chief Executive Lance Podell told Reuters, adding that the domain would now be part of a silent auction.
Moniker was selling HELL.com on behalf of a group called BAT Flli LLC, whose founder Kenneth Aronson registered the name in 1995.
It's not the first time that Aronson has tried to sell HELL.com. He put the address on the auction block in April 2000, at a starting bid of $8 million.
In an interview with Reuters in 2000, Aronson said members of The Final.org, an enigmatic collective of digital artists and creative visionaries, were using HELL.com as a private destination for their work.
According to the site, HELL.com is a "private parallel web" not accessible with a Web browser.
The auction on Friday included a list of domain names such as cameras.com, which pulled in $1.5 million. Sexeducation.com that sold for $120,000 and babies.net which went for $26,000.
Flowers.mobi, an address with the new extension for mobile devices, went for $200,000, while fun.mobi pulled in $100,000.
A boom in Internet advertising driven by companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have sent prices for sought-after domain names soaring.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe the good folks in the village of Hell, Michigan need a municipal web site. Hell is a small town, north by northwest of Ann Arbor, MI a few miles; north on Highway 23 or east out of Lansing, MI then switch to County Road 19 going south. Population is a hundred people more or less; their only industry seems to be a tourist shop which sells a variety of trinkets and ashtrays and T-shirts all of which proudly note "I've been through Hell" along with highway maps with arrows on them which point out the fastest way to go 'Straight to Hell'. Maybe some day someone will pay the slight fortune being asked for the domain name. PAT]