CYBERSPACE March 10 – Appearing on the YNOT Bob Humpday Lunch show, a popular Internet radio show for adult Webmasters, WhiteHouse.com owner Dan Parisi told hosts YNOTBob and LAJ that he has received an offer as high as two million dollars for his prized domain name.CYBERSPACE March 10 – Appearing on the YNOT Bob Humpday Lunch show, a popular Internet radio show for adult Webmasters, WhiteHouse.com owner Dan Parisi told hosts YNOTBob and LAJ that he has received an offer as high as two million dollars for his prized domain name. The domain name was put up for sale several months ago, and despite the offer Parisi said the bidding process is still ongoing.
Parisi bought the domain name WhiteHouse.com back in May of 1997 from a small retail business owner; the goal was always to turn the domain name into a successful online business, yet not necessarily a porn site. Initial failures to turn a profit from a politically themed Web site, coupled with the success that was being reported from the online adult entertainment industry, caused Parisi to alter course and turn WhiteHouse.com into what would eventually become one of the most notorious porn sites ever.
“When we first started in ’97, we had it set up for a site for, like, political discussion and parody and so forth, and basically nobody went to the site,” Parisi explained to hosts YNOTBob and LAJ. “I read this article in USA Today about these adult sites were making money, so what I did is I asked the lawyers, ‘Can I turn this into an adult site?’ and they said, ‘Yes,’ so we turned it into an adult site in September of 1997.”
Asked whether he had a marketing blitz in place when the site was converted, Parisi explained that the publicity found him all on its own. “All these newspapers started contacting us, and then it went from there,” he explained.
As for the bidding process, Parisi said that his first round of offers resulted in several hundred bids that were filtered down to seventy-five legitimate offers of interest. Saying that he would start looking through the second round of offers in a couple of weeks, Parisi was also willing to disclose the amount of his biggest offer to date. “The highest offer that came in was two million,” he said.
WhiteHouse.com has been the subject of a considerable amount of debate since it went adult in 1997; critics charge that the site lures children into viewing explicit materials since the domain name is often typed in by mistake by children looking for the government’s WhiteHouse.gov Web site.
LAJ asked Parisi to address the controversy regarding his Web site and children.
“Our records show that ninety nine plus percent of the people that go to [whitehouse.com], you know, are going there expressly looking for adult content,” Parisi claimed.
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