Interesting things happen when you allow your domain name to expire. Take an old, pre-blog vanity site, neilmc.net. For reasons that will become obvious, I’m not linking to it, and I’d urge you not to type in the address just yet.
I let it run out earlier this year – nothing of interest there, just some old cuttings, so I was happy for it to fall off the net. I didn’t imagine that it would become home to Blind Date Bangers – and, let me tell you, they’re not talking about anything you’d have for breakfast. And no, it isn’t worksafe. While some clearly think Completetosh quite obscene already – one company in the City has already banned it for “pornographic content” (where? where!) – it doesn’t have a patch on its elder brother.
My old domain has, shockingly, been converted into something lots of people will want to access, but I could put a stop to it. Credonic, the company based in Hallandale that now owns rights to this mighty media property, wants $500. They’ll be lucky – the worldwide community of Neil Mcs is pretty small and, frankly, pretty tight too. Put on your best Scots accent to say “it’s just not a prudent sum” for a domain that cost only a few quid back in 2000. We’ll suffer the reputational damage – just leave our wallets out of it. Call us pornographers. Just never, ever, call us reckless.
But I wonder what adds the value? The Googlejuice has all but evaporated for the site, apart from one Guardian piece pointing to my old domain. How much do they rely on former owners, embarrassed at their name being used to host porn, ponying up in order to keep it out Credonic’s hands? Credonic clearly has a number of other domains, all at the same price. Is Paula Scarbrough scrambling to save paulascarbrough.com from shame?
Meanwhile, my first weblog – Swindonlog.com – has been bought up by Gateway Traffic LLC of Wilmington, and they’re now trying to sell various sporting magazines through it. Good luck to ‘em – I don’t think there will be a huge appetite for Waterski magazine among the small community of Swindon Town fans I wrote for. A landlocked town, it once had a canal, but that was filled in to allow a Burger King to be built some years ago.
As a footnote, I wrote about the difficulties of creating your own webpage here back in 2000. These days, the piece would be half the length, incur a tenth of the cost, and broadly involve the instruction “go to Typepad and pick a template”.
Maybe the worldwide community of Neil Macs could amalgamate with the worldwide community of Neil Mcs and we could have a really BIG porn site. Excellent.
I notice the GU story you link to still points to http://www.neilmc.net. You might want to fix that
HELP!
I too just found out that a domain name I let expire is now is porno site owned by credonic.
Is there anything I can do?
kristinakolerichphotography.com is the name; now it’s a blind date porno site. The company is blowing me off – any advice? I do not want my name connected to a porn site.
Credonic is owned by Petr Moukhanov.
Add me to the casulty list. I had an awful time. I had a legitimate classical music group which I had advertised for a couple years. I discontinued it and credonic.com grabbed it up and it is no porn! Wow they are nasty little devils. I tried emailing and they sent me a response in all caps stating my site was taken due to lack of payment! What! they are just plan sleazy. Look at http://www.brownwelsh.com/HPLo.....284954.htm this is what they did to me but I’m not a big name! Can we have a class action suit against this organization?
I let a domain name lapse and now credoNIC is asking for $500 for it, though they say they’ll accept offers as low as $250. How generous. I’m worried that they’ll turn it into a porn site now.
They did this to Daimler Chrysler, had some sort of legal battle and Chrysler won: http://www.brownwelsh.com/HPLo.....284954.htm
I would definitely like to form some sort of class action suit against this company for pulling such a deplorable scam.