Donuts acquisition of Rightside to happen overnight

Rightside should no longer exist as a public company tomorrow morning.

The sun has gone into hiding and a mist is falling in Seattle this morning, but executives at Rightside and Donuts won’t be getting much time outside anyway. They’ll be working to complete Donuts’ acquisition of its neighbor in Kirkland.

The tender offer for shares of Rightside (NASDAQ:NAME) expired at midnight this morning with 92% of shares tendered. That’s well above the 50% required for the acquisition to go through. The two companies are working today to complete the acquisition by tomorrow morning before the NASDAQ opens. This means that, barring any last minute hitches, Rightside will cease to be a publicly traded company tomorrow morning.

Donuts will now have about 240 top level domains in its stable, plus retail registrar Name.com and a large portfolio of .com domain names. It will be interesting to see if Donuts holds onto the non-TLD assets. Alas, as a private company, we won’t have as much insight into what the company does as we had with Rightside.