NameMedia sells off domain name portfolio.
Publicly traded Endurance International Group continued its roll up of the webhosting and domain name business last quarter with the acquisition of BuyDomains, the company announced today.
In his prepared statements for its quarterly earnings call, Endurance CEO Hari Ravichandran said:
Second, we closed the acquisition of BuyDomains, a Waltham, MA based provider of premium domain products and services, in the second half of September. BuyDomains allows us to address our subscribers’ needs for premium domains. BuyDomains also provides us with certain rights to valuable intellectual property. We feel this acquisition rounds out our domain product offering, but does not change our go to market approach of leading with a web presence bundle.
Along with two unrelated recent acquisitions, Endurance paid a total of $77 million. [Update: Endurance paid $44.9 million.]
With the sale of the BuyDomains assets, NameMedia has essentially sold off its operating businesses and created an exit for its investors.
NameMedia sold its Afternic business to GoDaddy in September 2013. That left it with its million domain portfolio as well as the BuyDomains site, a popular domain name destination for small and medium businesses.
NameMedia was originally created with the purchase of Mike Mann’s BuyDomains (RareNames) for $72.5 million plus stock. The company filed to go public in 2008, but later withdrew its plans.
Good reporting here Andrew (and Mike Berkens). This deal almost slipped past the radar for most industry observers, including me.
As for transaction size, at $77 million, including 2 “unrelated acquisitions”, this is about as close a public company can get to “terms were not disclosed”! In other words, we can pretty much assume that nobody on the sell-side is presumably too thrilled with this outcome. I can see why!
Congratulations to the Endurance management team for capitalizing on what looks to be a fire sale for a portfolio of domain assets which appears to be have been purchased at a steep discount to fair market value.
How many domains does buydomains control? I’m curious how much per domain it was sold for.
(Note: I’m seeing that about 950,000 domains use buydomains nameservers.)
Larry, I believe that number is about right. So they paid somewhere between $1-80 per domain.
Andrew. Can you explain your thoughts behind that math a bit more ?
They paid no more than $77 million (that was the total for three acquisitions, of which I suspect BD was the largest). Divide that between 950k domains and you get a max of $80/domain.
Purchase price was $44.9 million
https://domainnamewire.com/2014/11/07/endurance-paid-44-9-million-for-buydomains/