Bloomberg/BusinessWeek just published a story about the tentative approval of .XXX by ICANN and the CEO of the ICM registry, Stuart Lawley entitled “The Man Who Would Be The Dot-XXX King“.
You will have to read the whole story which you can find here, but here are a couple of the more interesting points;
Mr. Lawley is a very wealthy guy.
According to the article he was named by the London Sunday Times as one of the richest 1,000 people in England, having taken an ISP public.
As part of the .xxx extension, Lawley plans on offering “a payment business similar to PayPal for dot-xxx sites, which he says could process $3 billion to $4 billion in transactions a year.”
You read it right, $3 to $4 BILLION dollars in transactions a year and the payment platform would only be opened to those sites that were using the .xxx extension.
If this becomes true, he is going to be moving up the list of the top 1,000, which when published in 2000, had Mr. Lawley ranked 338 tied with none other than George Harrison of the Beatles.
Interesting story Michael… Thank you for sharing.
The whole payment processing thing is genius if he pulls it off.
Disclaimer: i have not read the whole article.
Very interesting. Thanks for pointing this article out.
Removing payment barriers while protecting privacy could actually be a huge thing as credit cards have gotten so strict with processing adult.
I guess he’s rich b/c of ideas like this. Nice idea.
Could be PayPal white label. That would be easy and the kind of strategy that’s been done for years.
But most subscribers are already on recurring programs with credit card and other providers.
I know a guy that does $2 million a month off a blogspot site releasing two short movies a week, shot and edited by him in his own home. I think a lot of the type in and search business has been lost to these home businesses that grew through word of mouth on social networks and movie reviews on hundreds of blogging affiliates.
Since the domain owners offer no content why not cut them out and license the domains direct to content providers with the payment gateway as a means to take a cut and to gather data to use to market additional subscriptions and offers? Why have 6% of 4 billion when you can have 75%.?
I think there will be hesitation from consumers. Who wants their boss or wife to find .xxx site visits in the history logs?
I also see big changes emerging. When you hook your PC up to your flat screen and can stream any movie from NetFlix or any other site how long will it take NetFlix or Comcast to figure out they have a conduit to a $4 billion market?
I wish him luck though.
Porn and credit card processing. What could go wrong with that??
He must be dreaming if he thinks he can just walk in & take business away from adult providers’ existing processors (who they are already happy with)…a guy with no track record…who just happens to run the .xxx registry
Adult providers are against this whole .xxx idea in the 1st place.
Adult providers: “If it aint broke, why fix it”
Agreed.. Adult providers that I have talked to are just yawning over this. The only extensions that seem to have sticking power are .com, net, .org.
“He must be dreaming if he thinks he can just walk in & take business away from adult providers’ existing processors”
Well if Mr.Lawley does succeed in offering “a payment business similar to PayPal for dot-xxx sites…” that could appeal to many, many users.
Remember one of the benefit’s PayPal offers to both Businesses and Consumers is that the actual credit card info is only known to PayPal.
This is good for the consumer.
Not having to comply with security and record keeping requirements for that credit card info is good for the Business.
poor future fot .xxx
too easy to block all the .xxx sites at provider level
how many non-porn sites will use the .xxx TLD?
I would say more than you think, especially if people start typing in the .xxx extension
@BreakingNewsBlog.us: The biggest opponent of the .xxx has been the adult industry. Remember, the ICM registry, the one proposing the whole .xxx idea, is not part of the adult industry.