I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With ItMike Carson5 min read·Just now--ListenShareFriendster was the first social network. It has a long history, but the website friendster.com went dead in 2015 and the company officially shut down three years later in 2018. That’s where this story begins.The domain name friendster.com was registered on March 22 2002. After the site shut down in 2015, the domain did not resolve for 8 years. However, in October 2023 I noticed that the domain name was resolving once again, but it was showing a lot of popup ads. I was curious who owned it, so I looked at the WHOIS info and recognized the owner as a customer of park.io, a company I founded in 2014, and that I had corresponded with him previously over email.I reached out to him and said I was interested to buy the domain. He told me he had bought it for $8k and now was making ad revenue from the existing traffic. He bought it at gname.com, a site that hosts expired domain name auctions where you can buy prerelease domains from various Chinese/Asian registrars.Press enter or click to view image in full sizefriendster.com expired domain name auctionThe domain had expired and was up for auction and he got the domain as the high bidder for $7456. You can see the final auction page in the screenshot above.Can you believe he bought the domain friendster.com for only $7456? What a crazy deal! I’m in the domain name business and I check domain name auctions almost daily, but I still didn’t see this one. I wasn’t familiar with gname.com. You’d have to be specifically watching the domain friendster.com at the right time to find and participate in the auction, or you’d have to actively watch gname.com daily to see this auction.He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin.There is only one friendster.com domain name in the world, and I found the idea of owning it very fun and interesting. Building a social network on Friendster seemed like it would be so much fun.So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.He also let me know that the trademarks for Friendster were expiring within the next year. I consulted lawyers and, after a lengthy process, on May 13 2025 I was informed that I now owned the trademarks for Friendster.Friendster trademarkToday I feel that social networks foster a lot of negativity, but I remembered Friendster as being a really positive and enjoyable experience (except when the site would not load, which was really frustrating). I wanted to create something positive — something that people would enjoy and find useful.I created a basic social network on friendster.com and invited some people in from the waitlist, but they didn’t seem super excited about it. Not selling data, no algorithms, ads, etc.. was nice but didn’t seem enough of a draw. I wondered what else I could do. So I posted to Hacker News.Press enter or click to view image in full sizeMy post on Hacker NewsThere were a lot of really good comments and feedback, but I thought this one was especially interesting:Press enter or click to view image in full sizea good comment on Hacker NewsThe idea that the only way to…

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