The Washington Post published a very interesting and in-depth article on AI porn at the weekend, that is well worth reading (although it may be behind a paywall). One of the most revealing parts of the piece is an interview with Steve Lightspeed, the adult industry veteran who is the man behind top AI porn generator DeepFake.com. He also recently acquired the premium domain name Porn.ai. In talking to the Washington Post, he revealed that the total sum spent on both names, as well as DeepFakes.com, was $550,000. That’s quite a sum, especially since the value of adult domains has been steadily diminishing for years. According to DomainInvesting.com the previous owner of Porn.ai bought the name for just $7,500, so likely turned in a very healthy profit.
There used to be a time when premium adult domains were amongst the most valuable on the market. With AI porn set to be the future of adult entertainment, one might think that even $100K or $250K spent on Porn.ai would be a bargain. The domain name sex.com sold for $14 million all the way back in 2005. At the time it was the most expensive domain ever sold. It was then sold again for $13 million in 2013 – already showing the decline in value of adult domains. Porno.com went for $8.8 million as recently as 2015, while Porn.com was sold for $9 million. FreePorn.com went for nearly 4 1/2 million dollars in 2008. Porn.ai itself was previously sold for just $7,500 in 2018.
The domain name market has declined in value over the years, and domains selling for over one million dollars are much rarer now. This is partly due to Google’s search algorithm taking a more cautious approach with ‘exact match domains’. Previously, it was very easy to get to the top of Google with an exact match domain such as ExpensiveYachts.com or ShemaleVideos.com, even with thin or poor content. But adult domain prices have come down even more sharply, due to porn tubes making the adult industry less profitable, and concentrated into the hands of a few big players such as the owners of Pornhub.com. As an illustration of this, in the last week it was reported that the domain name Sound.ai was sold for $250,000. Meanwhile, even domains such as Pose.ai and Witness.ai were bought for tens of thousands of dollars each. At the time of writing, ten domain names with the extension .ai are in the top 30 domain name sales of the year so far, none of them adult related.
When it comes to AI porn, nobody really knows how easy it will be to make a profit through it, how people will make a profit out of it, or what the legal and regulatory framework will be with regard to it in five or ten years time. All we can truthfully say for certain is that it will likely upend the existing adult industry, probably far more than the porn tubes did. Given what we’ve just seen with Sora and the incredible advances that are being made now even with text-to-video generation, it’s possible that AI porn could be a trillion dollar industry within five years. A domain name like Porn.ai represents a gateway to those potential riches.
Steve Lightspeed made a sizeable fortune with his famous ‘Lightspeed Girls’ (which included the likes of Tawnee Stone and Jordan Capri), before the free porn tubes struck the industry. Now he’s taken the decision to return and plough some of that money back in, just as another seismic tidal wave is about to hit. But this time, he’s hoping to surf it all the way, and told the Washington Post that he plans to have fully functioning ‘AI cam girls’ on his site within two years. For now though, he’s struggling to break even, despite having seen his membership base grow to over 500,000 registered users (looking at my affiliate stats, I have sent him 63,000 of those members, largely from my Best AI porn generators list).
It’s too early to call Jones’s (Lightspeed’s) venture a success. Right now he’s breaking even, he said, and all revenue goes toward improving the AI. As his customer base grows, so will the massive computational cost of generating images. It costs $12 per day to rent a server from Amazon Web Services, he said, and generating a single picture requires users to have access to a corresponding server. His users have so far generated more than 1.6 million images.
As a footnote, the premium domain name VRPorn.com was also sold for a bargain soon after the first Oculus headset was launched (I understand that the price was considerably less than six figures), and then turned into the most popular adult VR site (in fact, the most popular VR site period) for a number of years. A year or so ago, the site – which of course includes the domain name – was bought by the owners of VR Bangers. It is not known how much money changed hands, but I would be very surprised if it was less than a couple of million dollars.
