Company adds to its cash pile as .dds, .store and .blog are settled.
New top level domain name company Minds + Machines announced today that it has won the contention set for the .dds domain name, beating Google.
DDS is short for “Doctor of Dental Surgery” and is the designation that most U.S. dental schools give graduates. Dentists often display their titles as “Jan Smith, DDS”.
The domain name faces a bit of competition, including .dentist and .dental.
Minds + Machines also lost a seven party auction for .store and a mammoth nine party auction for .blog.
Considering the price it paid for .dds and its auction proceeds from .store and .blog, plus the small refunds from ICANN on the latter two, Minds + Machines added $3.4 million cash to its balance sheet.
The company now has $48 million cash, which makes up about 40% of its market capitalization.
All three top level domain names were slated to go to ICANN’s “auctions of last resort” later this month.
Why on earth would Google have wanted .dds anyway – they simply do ‘t need to buy up the acronyms for every qualification/profession out there. I still can’t help thinking that the new .gtlds are becoming barking mad. Imagine how many dental surgeries are thinking they must rush out and change their name from something like OasisDentalCare.co.uk to OasisDentalCare,dds – and then articulating this to all of their baffled customers and suppliers.
NOT MANY!
If I had OasisDentalCare.co.uk, I’d obviously rather change it to oasis.dds than oasisdentalcare.dds. That’s the point of this.
Yes it certainly is less of a mouthful!
So could we calculate that Store and Blog went for circa $48+mm combined?
They added $3.4M, the $48M number is cumulative. But given the number of players in the .store and .blog auction, we can do some back of the envelope math.
Let’s say M+M paid $2M for .dds, that means they pocketed 5.4 M from losing the two auctions. Ignore the small ICANN refunds. There were 16 participants in the two auctions and 14 “losers” to split the proceeds. M+M was in both, so it represents 2/14ths, or 1/7th of the proceeds. So 5.4M / (1/7) = $38M.
You can plug in whatever # you want for M+M’s actual proceeds from the two auctions.
Cheers Andrew, so approx. $38 for the two domains Blog and Store, That seems alot to me.
I have seen these cash situations, slowly eaten away by management expenses.
As renewal numbers come out, the writing is on the wall here, you won’t see as strong of bids. The momentum has slowed.
Then MM is only left with under performing extensions, and all the cash is quickly expensed out via options, bonuses, management expenses, and salaries.
Looks like .Blog went for $30 million. Insane. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/13/who_just_bought_dotblog_for_30m/
Kieren’s math is off in that article.
It looks like he divided the 3.4 million by 16 participants, but only 14 actually get the money.
Second, Minds + Machines got 2 shares in that.
Finally, he doesn’t consider the amount M+M paid for .dds, which would actually raise the amount split by the participant.
Reading the article, Kieren basically guesses it’s $30M of the total pot.
So I wouldn’t say with any degree of accuracy that it was $30M, but it’s certainly possible.