A huge domain name sale: Medicare.com sells for $4.8 million.
eHealthInsurance Services, Inc. has acquired the domain name Medicare.com for $4.8 million.
On the company’s investor conference call yesterday the company said it paid $4.5 million in cash for the domain and forgave $0.3 million in receivables from the seller. The seller was apparently an existing business partner with eHealth.
Although the whois record for Medicare.com has used whois privacy for a long time, the most recent public record shows the seller was Tennessee company Medx Publishing Inc. This is the same company that recently purchased the domain name Medicaid.com when the U.S. government let it expire.
Medicare.com was a lightly-developed site, so the company got more than a domain name. The site was monetized by lead gen and Google Adsense. It was basically an affiliate site.
eHealth will get some SEO benefits from purchasing the domain name. However, in all of eHealth’s announcements and communications about the deal it has specifically described it as a domain name acquisition. Keep in mind that the U.S. government’s official website about Medicare is Medicare.gov. We all know what happens when there’s a .com domain name to match a popular .gov website.
It seems clear to me that eHealth would have purchased the domain name even without the site, so I’m comfortable calling this the most expensive public domain name sale so far in 2014.
If you look at the amount of money spent on healthcare, and how much valid information can be used to promote healthcare, this is a drop in the bucket.
Well done, paying up for a great asset.
Medicare.com was doing north of $2M a year in revenue several years ago so it was likely even more at the time eHealth acquired them. I’d be surprised if that was left out of the multiple paid for the name/website.
I assume it’s doing better, but remember $2M revenue is very different from earnings. Especially if you’re paying a lot for traffic.
According to SEMRush, there’s been a continual slide in organic traffic from peak in 2012. Scores have gone from 55K 1/2012 to 32K 1/2014 to 23K on 1/2014.
Domain investors like to focus on clear domain-only sales, since those best indicate the market value of domains per se.
Sales of developed domains (i.e. websites) are equally important, although its’ much harder to assess the valuation placed on the domain when other assets are included — content, code, SEO, customer base, etc.
In a way post-development domain sales are actually the MOST important data for domain buyers because they show that a premium domain is an asset that enhances the company’s value in the event of a buyout or merger.
Data such as this sale support the idea that domain names are not simply one-time vanity expenditures. Rather, they are assets with resale value. Some depreciate like cars. Others appreciate like houses or (especially) land.
Land is perhaps the best analogy because further development adds to the value. Real estate appraisals encounter much the same question: How much of the value is due to the physical building, and how much derives from the address?
It’s a developed website, with a PR5 and 1000+ backlinks. Shouldn’t be on the domain sales list IMHO.
Bingo!!!
This is great news for my long tail healthcare domain that nobody knows about!
I wonder if there is any risk of lawmakers deciding that “Medicare” is a term that the US Government owns. In the case of GIBill.com, that didn’t work out so well for the owners of the domain.
Quinstreet was overly aggressive in their marketing of for-profit schools to veterans who were using their GI Bill money to get an education. A lot of them ended up in degree programs that were very expensive and they didn’t have the financial ability to complete. To make matters worse, often credits from those schools couldn’t be transferred to a state or community college. Additionally, for years they had no disclosures on the site stating that it wasn’t the official GI Bill website. Was very misleading and there’s evidence that was gathered by the government in their investigation that Quinstreet was fully aware of that and didn’t care because they were making so much money from the for-profit school advertisers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070320123315/http://gibill.com/
Don’t mislead consumers, it’s pretty simple.
There’s nothing misleading about Medicare.com.
I own HealthCarin.com, I made it available for sale on Sedo, but I don’t know if it’s also a premium and wanted domain name…
I don’t kknow why the government didn’t lawsuit the old domain name owners, since medicare is trademarked…