Local.com Buys Octane360 for Up to $11 Million
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
Company powered by geo domains is acquired.
I got a “we should catch up” email from Octane360 CEO Adam Rioux last night. Then this morning I see this – he just sold his company for $5 million in cash and stock plus an earnout of $5.9 million.
My first thought: that was fast. My second thought: I’m not too surprised.
I’ve been singing the praises of Octane360′s business model for a while, and talking about what it can do for owners of localized domain names. But talk about a fast sale — it was still essentially a beta offering.
My previous success with Octane360 was selling listings on sites such as StlDayCare.com. But as the company pulled the pieces together and started selling the leads collected on similar sites, that started to pull in additional revenue. By teaming with Local.com, Octane360 should quickly move to the next level.
I consider this a win for the domain industry. In many ways Octane360 is a domain name company — one that has figured out how to merge the world of SEO and local geo domains.
Further Reading:
- Local.com Gives Octane360 More Octane
- Octane360 Domain Monetization Review (One Year Later)
- Octane360 Monetizes Long Tail Geo Domain Names
Tags: octane360
You did a nice write-up about them in Feb.
I thought about signing up but I didn’t.
Sounds like I should have?
In Feb. you were very optimistic.
What have been your results for the 200 domains you placed with them?
@ johnny come lately – I’ve been impressed. I put all categories of domains on their system. After 4 or 5 months I wrote some of the categories off as “too hard to sell local listings”. For example, prefab. Then I logged in today and saw they sold about 6 listings on my prefab sites over the past month.
I think the Local.com deal will mean really good things for clients. Hopefully after I talk to Adam I’ll have a better picture.
heard a lot about octane 360 and was about to try it for my top traffic names.
gle.com,indiantravel.com,miamitravel.com.
im trying out above.com right now but maybe someday i will give it a shot as well.
ive heard that their proprietary marketing platform really works.
good acquisition overall.
do they charge for developing domains ? they don’t provide enough details on their site.
@ Domainer – if you have 500+ local geo domains, contact them and they’ll give you details.
How many domains did they have in their portfolio?
@ Jay – they have some, but I don’t think this was a portfolio acquisition. It was a technology/business process acquisition.
Andrew,
I see a mixture of SEO, RSS feeds and lead gen. What other technology did they have to offer? The white label, perhaps?