Who on earth would pay $1 mn for hell?

By Staff
|
Google Oneindia News

Los Angeles, Oct 28: No one was buying hell -- or at least its red-hot Web address.

HELL.com was among hundreds of Internet domain names up for auction in Hollywood, Florida yesterday, by domain asset management provider Moniker.com, a unit of marketing services firm Seevast Corp.

The owner put a minimum price of 1 million dollar on the underworld's domain, confident of high interest after the salacious address, Sex.com, sold for about 12 million dollar 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 dollar.

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 yesterday included a list of domain names such as cameras.com, which pulled in 1.5 million dollar. Sexeducation.com that sold for 120,000 dollar and babies.net which went for 26,000 dollar.

Flowers.mobi, an address with the new extension for mobile devices, went for 200,000 dollar, while fun.mobi pulled in 100,000 dollar.

A boom in Internet advertising driven by companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have sent prices for sought-after domain names soaring.

Reuters

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