PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — PIMPROLL's investment in .xxx domain Porn.xxx appears to be paying off.
Porn.xxx just landed on the first Google search page in the U.S. for the keyword "porn."
Stuart Lawley, founder and CEO of ICM Registry, which operates sTLD .xxx, said that Porn.xxx's catapult up the ranks "shows, in our opinion, that .xxx sites are punching above their weight in search engine performance.
"We are delighted," Lawley told XBIZ, noting that, similarly, HDAnalPorn.xxx is No. 1 for the search term " anal porn."
PIMPROLL, which started up in 2001 and later purchased the Porn.com domain for $9.5 million, rolled out Porn.xxx as a tube site in May.
The company operates hundreds of paysites and hosts an affiliate program. It also operates HostedTube.com affiliate tool, allowing affiliates to create their own tube sites; TrafficForce.com, a source for premium traffic; and PaidPerView.com, a system that allows publishers to display their own content across a wide range of networked PIMPROLL sites in return for direct payments on a per video view basis.
In other news relative to .xxx, Lawley said that the " domain matching " program to secure .sex, .porn and .adult names for .xxx owners is still operative but there will be a cut-off date sometime in early 2014.
Lawley also noted that .xxx second-year renewal rates "are very high and have exceeded our expectations , looking like somewhere in the mid 80s-90s percentage wise." He also said that of the domain names ICM Registry sold on Day 1, more than 60 percent are still owned by the initial registrant after two years.