Rick Schwartz Books 4th Highest Domain Sale with Porno.com

DOMAINSPACE—According to TheDomains.com's Michael Berkins, domain king Rick Schwartz has achieved several notable accomplishments with his very recent sale of porno.com for a reported $8,888,888.88, including the fact that the sale was an all-cash transaction through escrow.com. But that's not all. Berkins notes, "Porno.com becomes the highest reported domain name sale in five year, since of Sex.com resold in 2010 for $13 million dollars," and he cites DN Journal stats to point out that the porno.com sale "will rank as the 4th highest publicly reported, all cash, domain sale of all time." Schwartz had the domain for a long time. According to Berkins, he bought it "in August of 1997 for $42,000 'from a college student that bought it the week before for $5,000.'" Amazingly, over the years, Schwartz claims that the site “has earned well in excess of over $10 million via parking and redirects without ever providing actual adult content.” Berkins does the math: "So Rick’s $42,000 investment generated over $20 million." He then places the domain investment up against Wall Street. "By comparison,  if you bought $1,000 worth of stock of Amazon at the IPO price in 1997 according to statista.com, the $1,000 would be worth about $239,000, so a $42K investment in Amazon at its IPO price would be worth a about $10 Million today, or less than half of Rick’s return on the domain name Porno.com." Berkins does not consider why, with such returns, Scwartz decided to sell, concluding, "Clearly this will go down as  one of the greatest investments of all time." He also adds, "The buyer is a company out of Prague which owns other great domain names including Swingers.com and PornoTv.com." Our sources tell us that the ultimate purchaser is the owner of well-trafficked tube sites and other valuable adult online properties. Consideration of the sale was also offered by Domain Name Wire's Andrew Allemann, who writes, " I hear that porn purveyors are struggling, but clearly a lot of the online distributors are doing quite well. In my book, the three top public domain name sales of all time are now porn related: Sex.com, Porn.com and now Porno.com. (I ignore Fund.com, because there was some funny business going on with the buyer.) Also, consider the premium sales .xxx has managed to pull off in recent years. The company that bought Porno.com has purchased many other valuable domain names." This news will likely be greeted enthusiastically by the domainer community in general, As one commenter to the DNW story put it, "Rick IS a brilliant salesman! Kudos to The King! He has done an immense amount of work for the industry and this recent sale confirms it again. Making these sales stats public raises all decent .com boats!!!"