No one was buying hell on Friday -- or at least its red-hot Web
address.

HELL.com was among hundreds of Internet domain names up for auction in
Hollywood, Florida, by domain asset management provider Moniker.com, a
unit of marketing services firm Seevast Corp.

The owner put a minimum price of $1 million on the underworld's domain,
confident of high interest after the salacious address, Sex.com, sold
for about $12 million earlier this year. But there were no takers with
bids failing to reach the reserve price.

"The world is still alive and well. Nobody is going to hell right
now," Seevast Chief Executive Lance Podell told Reuters, adding that
the domain would now be part of a silent auction.

Moniker was selling HELL.com on behalf of a group called BAT Flli LLC,
whose founder Kenneth Aronson registered the name in 1995.

It's not the first time that Aronson has tried to sell HELL.com. He
put the address on the auction block in April 2000, at a starting bid
of $8 million.

In an interview with Reuters in 2000, Aronson said members of The
Final.org, an enigmatic collective of digital artists and creative
visionaries, were using HELL.com as a private destination for their
work.

According to the site, HELL.com is a "private parallel web" not
accessible with a Web browser.

The auction on Friday included a list of domain names such as
cameras.com, which pulled in $1.5 million. Sexeducation.com that sold
for $120,000 and babies.net which went for $26,000.

Flowers.mobi, an address with the new extension for mobile devices,
went for $200,000, while fun.mobi pulled in $100,000.

A boom in Internet advertising driven by companies such as Google Inc.
and Yahoo Inc. have sent prices for sought-after domain names soaring.

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe the good folks in the village of
Hell, Michigan need a municipal web site. Hell is a small town, north
by northwest of Ann Arbor, MI a few miles; north on Highway 23 or
east out of Lansing, MI then switch to County Road 19 going south.
Population is a hundred people more or less; their only industry
seems to be a tourist shop which sells a variety of trinkets and
ashtrays and T-shirts all of which proudly note "I've been
through Hell" along with highway maps with arrows on them which
point out the fastest way to go 'Straight to Hell'. Maybe some day
someone will pay the slight fortune being asked for the domain name.
PAT]