Lemonparty, The Legendary Shock Site, Is For Sale

The asking price for a piece of internet history? $450,000.

Three indelible images bestride the early 2000s shock internet: There is Goatse, the bent-over man stretching his ruby-grapefruit-red asshole into a ghastly rictus; there is Tubgirl, the fleshy woman geysering liquid feces into her own greedy mouth; and there is, perhaps most unforgettably, Lemonparty. Lemonparty is a single image of a ménage à trois between three ancient, age-spotted men. You know the one: At the right of the frame, two naked old men lovingly kiss. At the left, a third man performs tender fellatio.

And now you can own it, for the low, low price of $450,000. That's what Eric Johnson, the owner of the lemonparty.org domain, says he wants for the rights, he told BuzzFeed in an email. "Even if I was offered 100k today," Johnson wrote, "that would be a pretty quick and easy 'Thank you, but I'm not interested.'"

Johnson, a twentysomething freelance web marketer who would not disclose his location, became interested in buying absurd domain names when he stumbled across "Poo.com" in middle school. He's owned Lemonparty for nine years, during which, he says, the site has averaged somewhere around 10,000 unique visitors a day, and fetched 50 offers.

So, what will your $450,000 get you? Well, other than the rights to perhaps the most famous instance of nontraditional nonagenarian lovemaking in history, you get a URL that has actually, despite its shocking content, permeated popular culture. Well, to a limited extent, anyway.

And, potentially, money. Johnson says that in its lifetime, "Lemonparty would have generated enough money for the average person to buy a pretty decent house with...it pays the bills."

What it may not get you is any firmer understanding of where, exactly, the image came from, or why, exactly, it captured the imagination of a huge swath of internet users. Johnson says the image first became popular in the early aughts while being passed around internet relay chat — acting as a kind of proto-4chan — and if he knows anything about the identity of the lovers, he won't tell. "It adds mystique," he wrote.

Still, for less than half a million dollars, a piece of internet history can be yours.

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