Under Armour buys MapMyFitness for $150 million

Company didn’t spend a lot of money for its domain names.

Athletic apparel company Under Armour has acquired Austin, Texas company MapMyFitness for $150 million.

So what does this have to do with domain names?

Well, it’s kind of interesting when you dig into it.

The name MapMyFitness immediately set off alarm bells in my head when I heard about the acquisition. Not because it’s a local company, but because they recently bought a domain on the aftermarket.

My October 24 GoDaddy/Afternic end user report includes the company’s $1,200 purchase of MapMyLife.com.

Upon reading the news this morning, I decided to dig into the company’s other domain names and how it acquired them.

The company has several sites, including MapMyFitness.com, MapMyRun.com, MapMyRide.com, and MapMyWalk.com. Average price paid per domain: $10.

Yep, the company hand registered every one of these domains in 2006-2007.

I realize that’s a while ago, and more and more good .com domains have been registered since then. It’s become harder to hand register a workable domain name like these, but they still exist if you get creative and look for them.

Domainers might scoff at a domain like MapMyFitness.com. Isn’t MyFitness.com better? Or even Fitness.com?

Maybe. Or Maybe not. When you see the name MapMyFitness.com, you can make a pretty good guess as to what the company offers. If it were just Fitness.com, you might think it was a store offering fitness gear. Ditto for MyFitness.com.

The point is that it doesn’t always take an expensive domain to create a big business. Some domainers might scoff at a domain like MapMyFitness.com. But these domainers haven’t sold a company for $150 million, either.