The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) board has approved the addition of a .xxx TLD (top level domain) for use by the porn industry.
We saw the announcement about the approval of the XXX TLD in PC World. It looks like it will take a while to work through the process of formalizing the approval of the domain and it appears that the registration management will be handled by a company named The ICM Registry, which is the company that submitted the request for the addition of the new TLD.
The use of the xxx TLD will make it easier for browsers, security software and companies to filter or block porn sites. However, there is no requirement for porn companies to migrate to the new domains. In fact, it is very unlikely that existing porn sites will migrate because they have invested so much time and money developing their current domains. Besides that, I don’t think they will be anxious to grab domains that will make it easier to filter spam and porn sites from company networks. I once read a comment from one of the leaders in the porn industry who claims that porn sites get the bulk of their traffic from 8AM to 5PM, Monday through Friday.
Current players in the industry are likely to try to grab the duplicates of the names that they already have, and many new players will probably grab whatever else is available. It will be interesting to see who grabs which domains.
Here is some domain name registration trivia. It appears that in 2007 sex.com sold for $14 million and porn.com sold for $9.5 million. The next highest price ever received for a domain name was $7.5 million for business.com in 1999. There apparently is some big money to be made by selling top porn-related domains.