Popular UK domain forum changed hands last year, now upgraded.
If you don’t invest in .uk domain names, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Acorn Domains.
I don’t own any .uk names, but I know that Acorn Domains is a popular domain forum for UK investors. I get a good bit of traffic whenever a story there links to Domain Name Wire.
This week, the owner of Acorn Domains announced that he recently acquired the forum and had upgraded it.
New owner Steve Napier is a domain investor and SEO expert. He owns about 1,000 .uk domains in addition to other domains, he told Domain Name Wire.
Napier is also a Nominet member and has an accredited registrar.
In an email to Domain Name Wire, he wrote:
I acquired/bought my first online business in 2014 and got a taste for it. With my interest in domains and as an Acorn domains member I messaged ‘admin’ (Alan) at Acorn Domains to enquire if he would consider selling the forum business. He was mildly interested. 6 months later I asked again and the timing was right and we agreed a deal. I became the new owner in August 2015, Alan is a true gentleman and the transaction and process was smooth and trouble free. In March 2016 we re-built the forum design and migrated to a better platform (xenforo) which is fully responsive and mobile/tablet friendly. I’ve also moved Acorn Domains on to fast SSD hosting. It’s a nice thing to own a successful forum community in an area you are passionate about. The nature of domainers is such that forum topics cover a wide array of online business from website design and hosting to affiliate schemes and tax. I hope to continue to grow the Acorn Domains memberbase and take the forum to new heights over the coming years.
Nuno Alex says
Congratulations to Steve. Running and monetizing a forum is not trivial and it requires some expertise to avoid backlashes when you do changes. I’ve seen it firsthand on several places where I was a member for more than a decade… good luck!
YamadaMedia says
That’s why most community sites are acquired under the radar. Lots of active users don’t like change.
Nice to see AcornDomains making changes.
Eric Lyon says
I agree with both Nuno and Yamada. Not only is undertaking a large forum with hundreds of thousands of pages a daunting seo/sem task, you have to consider the impact an acquisition has on members that have gotten comfortable and settled in with their surroundings.
It not only takes years of work to get a forum running smooth, but to keep it consistent you still have to put in long hours of dedicated work daily. Otherwise, like many small, medium, and even large forum communities, they can literally die within a week or two and take you back to square one again.
Nice acquisition. I wish them all the best.
YamadaMedia says
Yes @Eric Lyon knows this all too well. 🙂
Nice to see you commenting here btw and wishing AcornDomains the best of luck Eric.
Francois says
I tried to contact the owner without chance…
Can you beleive they put as captcha the question: who is the company who is behind the co.uk?
paul says
Nominet!
simple no?