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from www.thedomains.com – BusinessWeek.com just published a cover piece on the ICM registry operator of .XXX and the applicant for the new gTLD’s or .Porn, .Sex, .Adult and its CEO Mr. Stuart Lawley.
The story is entitled “The New Republic of Porn”.
Its a long piece spanning over 6 pages and its goes into great depths about not only ICM’s struggle to get the .XXX extension, the lawsuit with Manwin, its future plans for .XXX and the new gTLD’s it applied for .Sex, .Porn and .Adult, but also Mr. Lawley shares a surprising amount of personal information all starting out with:
That Mr Lawley just bought a “one-story, five-bedroom, 9,300 square-foot stone house in the Bear’s Club”
“Stuart Lawley navigates Drive in his midnight sapphire Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupé, a $464,000, 3-ton, 12-cylinder land yacht so well-engineered that ensconced in its butter-soft leather, one barely senses motion at all. Lawley docks gently at a French-style château adjacent to the 15th fairway of a luxuriant tropical Florida golf course designed by “the Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus.
“Celine Dion owns a place nearby.”
“Michael Jordan is building on two lots just around the bend.”
“He offered $3.8 million, all cash, take it or leave it. She took it.”
“There’s a catch, however: In early June, the homeowners’ association delayed the closing because some members were uneasy about Lawley’s occupation. “The neighbors are worried that a ‘big-time pornographer’ is moving in,” Lawley says. “Bollocks!”
Here are some interesting points from the story:
“With more than 220,000 sites signed up so far, Lawley now presides, in his view, over a clean, well-lighted virtual mall. Site owners pay $60 a year for a typical .xxx domain, compared with less than $10 for a .com. ICM Registry auctioned “premium” names for much more.
The aforementioned shemales.xxx went for $200,000; fetish.xxx, for $300,000; gay.xxx, for $500,000. In the last three months of 2011, its first active quarter, the tiny company took in $25 million.”
“About 83,000 .xxx registrations, or about a third, he allows, are “defensive”
We didn’t know whether, if we built it, people would come,” Lawley concedes.
“He need not have worried. Last October, Corbin Fisher, a major gay studio in Las Vegas, said it would pay $500,000 for gay.xxx (the site is still under construction). In December, Clips4Sale, a downloadable video site, announced a $700,000 all-cash deal for a package of 30 premium names. Those big chunks of cash go to ICM. “We won,” says Lawley.
“The next step in the development of .xxx, the “real game-changer,” as Lawley calls it, will be the micropayment system he plans to introduce in early 2013. To finance the system, he says he is negotiating with a “major name-brand” bank, which he won’t yet identify. “Online porn is suffering the way the music business suffered with Napster and file-sharing,” Lawley says. “If there were a totally reliable way to buy small bits of high-quality adult content, the way you can download a single song from iTunes, people would go back to paying for it, the way they went back to paying for music.” He sees a winning combination in 99¢ porn via mobile technology. “As Apple’s app store bans adult,” he says, “there is a huge market for adult apps” developed independently for .xxx sites. Lawley says designers are already at work.”
“It’s remarkable that Lawley is making any money at all. Especially since he had to fight for seven years, spending millions of his own dollars, to get permission for .xxx from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit regulatory body.
“His persistence in the face of hostile lobbying by competitors, religious conservatives, and the U.S. government suggests that if the stubborn British entrepreneur claims to have a money-spinning solution for the Great Porn Depression, he should not be underestimated.”