ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Finally this hour, point your web browser to TeaParty.com and you will not find a site devoted to the political movement. You will find the website of The Tea Party, a Canadian rock band that has owned the domain name since the early 1990s.
Well, now the band is hoping to cash in. And, as NPR's Joel Rose reports, there seems to be no shortage of would-be buyers.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: The Tea Party may not be well known in the U.S., but trust me, they're big in Canada.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEAVEN COMING DOWN")
ROSE: The Tea Party started in Toronto in 1990. They named themselves after the poetry and hash smoking sessions of Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By the early 2000s, The Tea Party had recorded eight albums, toured the world and sold 1.6 million records. They broke up in 2005, then got back together. And, all along, the band got offers to sell its website, TeaParty.com.
STUART CHATWOOD: There's a bunch of small people kicking the tires and seeing if we'd be interested, but the first real political offer came in this summer that was of serious note, anyway.
ROSE: Stuart Chatwood plays bass for The Tea Party. He doesn't want to say who that offer was from, but he will say it was, quote, "significant."
CHATWOOD: It had a mid-seven digit back end to it and it was like, whoa. All of a sudden, we realized that our little house that we had built happened to be sitting right on top of a gold mine.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WALKING WOUNDED")
ROSE: Chatwood won't say much about his politics, except that he's very happy with his socialized medical care in Canada. Chatwood's first thought was to sell the website to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, but that didn't work out, so the band decided to sell TeaParty.com to the highest bidder. They hired a broker called Sedo, which sold the domain name Sex.com for $13 million.
Sedo spokesperson Kathy Nielsen doesn't think the Tea Party domain name will fetch that much, but she says it could be worth more than $1 million.
KATHY NIELSEN: You know, say it's a Tea Party group that needs it for fundraising. They can make a business case out of it and understand how much traffic the domain gets and how much search value they can get and they can put numbers to that and say, well, it's worth X amount to me.
ROSE: Others think X is going to be a relatively modest amount in the low to mid six figures. Bill Sweetman is the general manager of YummyNames, a firm that connects companies with domain names.
BILL SWEETMAN: This is one of those types of domains where shelf life or timing is so critical because, right now, the domain looks like it might be worth a lot, but after the election, this domain could be worth almost nothing, so it's a bit of a gamble.
ROSE: Another big question is who's going to cough up the dough? The Tea Party movement doesn't have a centralized top down organization. Some of the better funded groups like the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Patriots already have websites.
But Sweetman says those groups still have to consider buying TeaParty.com, if only to block their political rivals from doing the same.
SWEETMAN: How much would they pay to keep this out of the hands of another group or a party or somebody that wanted to put up sort of an anti-Tea Party website at that great domain name? Keeping it out of the hands of the wrong people is certainly worth something to them. How much? You know, time will tell.
ROSE: No matter what happens, the proposed sale has already worked out well for the band. The Tea Party reunited last year and toured for the first time in six years. Bassist Stuart Chatwood says all the unexpected media attention on the band's website did help promote those shows, but in the end, it's really worth more to somebody else.
CHATWOOD: As a band, we rely on Facebook and Twitter and the website. It's still very important, but we can easily rename our website to something else and continue on, business as usual. But, to someone else, just the purity of TeaParty.com is just so valuable.
ROSE: The Tea Party's broker expects a deal to close in the next few months, so the next time you click on TeaParty.com, the site could be singing a very different tune. Joel Rose, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WALKING WOUNDED")