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Added: 21 September 2000
[Commentary]

Dirty Prospecting

Fuckmeuptheass.com is gone. So is whitecottonpanties.com and shplooey.com. The domain name frontier is all but dried up but, given the infinite range of the English language, there has to be a million dollar rude word out there that has not yet been tapped.

This Saturday it was raining outside. Instead of doing the laundry, we went prospecting for dirty domain names. Services like register.com are the modern day equivalent of the gold pan. They check the Internic database, and reveal ownership criteria for all existing domain names. If a domain name does not exist yet, all you have to do is whip out your credit card, fill out an online form, pay the $35, and Jack's your man.

The trick is to pick a name that is reasonably short, has no trademark issues, and hooks into a valuable commodity. The biggest selling commodity on the Internet is, of course, sex, and the great dirty domain name is today's gold in the river. It's only recently that expletives have been allowed in domain names, and as soon as they went on the market all the obvious choices were snatched up immediately. Through necessity, people have created combinations of words that do not ordinarily go together at all, possibly inventing entirely new fetishes along the way--names like tittypoo.com, for example. We brainstormed the filthiest and most ludicrous word combinations we could come up with and then checked them out, one at a time through our lousy dial-up connection. It was about as fast as playing scratch-off lottery with your fingernail.

It wasn't easy. The first twenty or so we tried were all registered, and we weren't going for the obvious. We were being pretty creative, referring to the Village Voice personals for the latest in saucy vocabulary. Pimpylongstocking.net and tit-tanic.com were all staked out, even cockcockcockcock.com was gone. Some English person had even gone in and taken all the UK slang dirty words. Wabs, jubblies, and spaff have all been snapped up.

The scarcity of rude word domain names is partly explained by the catch-all model that porn entrepreneurs use to attract business. Many domain names simply redirect traffic to central porn sites, so that typing in virtually-any-dirty-word.com will lead you to a site where you can spend money on virtual sex. But there is still money to be made. There has to be. The Oxford English Dictionary adds about 20 new words each year, some of them dirty. There is the entire Spanish language to play with (cojones.com is gone but what about something obscure, like porelculo.com?). There are actually quite a few very juicy .org and .net domains still available, but nobody seems to care. We've heard rumors that .net and .ws are the next domain name bad boys, but for now if you want to be a player it has to be .com.

We kept on hunting. For some reason we homed in on the word panties. We tried blacksilkpanties, pantysniff, cottonpantyfactory, and countless others, all with no joy. Just as we started to lose our steam, a yelp of joy came:

"Pantyslut.com is available!"

We reeled as we saw our mortgage paid off before our eyes. Yes, we have a mortgage, we own a condominium in a goodly New England college town, we buy lighting fixtures from Ikea, and we are proud owners of pantyslut.com.

Once you own a rude domain name, the next step is to put it up for sale, unless you want to start your own website full of naughty streaming videos and grainy animated gifs, that is. Virtual real estate brokers like greatdomains.com will auction off your domain name for a small sales commission. Loans.com recently sold for $3,000,000; even names as esoteric as inkibinki.com are asking $2,000,000 on the grounds that "it's fun to say inkibinki."

Pantyslut is perhaps not as memorable as sex.com, but it has its peculiar virtues. What, one might ask, is a pantyslut? The term is strangely evocative of private fetishes, the sort of term one might idly dream up but never dare to say. Certainly, it is thrillingly filthy. Uttering it aloud can make a whole room full of people feel dirty. And it does have a ring to it. Whooarghhhh, sluts in panties, give me some of that! Sunday night we wrote to all the professional panty webmasters we could find to offer them the chance to buy into the coming pantyslut craze. So far we've had one very cordial but negative response from a top panty entrepreneur. He said it was a good name but that he has a whole collection of panty domains already and hardly has the time to develop them. These panty people are a hardworking lot.

While the exceptional domain name has proven to attract multimillion dollar sales, most of the prospectors out there seem to be dreaming when they ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars for names like 123AAAtotalsexnow.com. Where pantyslut.com fits into the picture, only time will tell. A year from today we could be millionaires, but to be honest we'd feel lucky to get our investment back and maybe enough for some Chinese take-out. Keep your eyes open. It could be big.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since the original writing of this Bonkworld feature, a miracle has occurred, namely, somebody actually offered, out of the blue, to purchase the domain name pantyslut.com from your humble hosts for the tidy sum of $1,000. This shocking eventuality took place in early September 2001, approximately a year and a half after the initial purchase of the domain name, and well after we had given up all hope of cashing in on our hare-brained scheme. Note that if we weren't so stupid, we would only have paid for one year's worth of ownership, but thanks to our mistake, we still owned it and were able to get that investment back and enough for a king's ransom in Chinese take-out. We don't know what may one day reside at www.pantyslut.com as a result of all this silliness, but we wish the enterprising young pornographer who ends up with it all the best of luck with his investment.]