GoDaddy continues to gobble up large domain name portfolios.
Just a week after completing a deal to acquire Donuts’ portfolio of about 200,000 domain names, GoDaddy appears to have purchased legendary domain investor Kevin Ham’s domain name portfolio, or at least part of it.
I detected a large number of domain names transferring to GoDaddy today and they all lead back to companies Kevin Ham has been associated with. The domain names were previously under Whois privacy at Uniregistry, and many of them have previously promoted that they are available for purchase through Mark.com, a broker service associated with Ham.
Kevin was profiled in a Business 2.0 story “The Man Who Owns the Internet”. I have reached out to people at Kevin’s company to confirm.
GoDaddy has acquired a handful of large portfolios in recent years. They have effectively bought out some of the largest domain name investors, including Michael Berkens. Their goal is usually to take portfolios that weren’t marketed through syndicated listings at Buy Now prices and increasing their sales velocity by setting reasonable prices in the Afternic distributed system.
Ron says
This is an epic portfolio, names like bible.com etc… I bet it was his second tier stuff.
Andrew Allemann says
Some good ones are transferring…employees.com, toll.com for example. Maybe not the ones he has developed.
Ron says
So are the names moving out of uniregistry over to godaddy?
Andrew Allemann says
Looks like they’ve moved into NameFind’s name but are still at Uniregistry.
George Kirikos says
Looks like Punyregistry will suffer some more shrinkage once those domains head to GoDaddy.
We’ll need to watch the upcoming SEC filings by GoDaddy for clues as to the transaction price (if the deal closed after September 30th, it’ll be a few more months).
Ron says
Godaddy has found a niche, and found the perfect fit for afternic, and their staff.
It will be interesting to see the value of these purchases in a few years, as they slowly sell thru.
Tony says
The Ham story is what got me into domaining. It’ll be interesting to see what Godaddy paid for the Donuts and Ham portfolios. Looks like Yun Ye cashed out at the peak even if that was 12+ years ago.
Logan says
Mmmm, I love donuts and ham.
JG says
They’ve retained about 80% of their top stuff. At least as of now. Could change I suppose…
Steve says
Maybe Mr. Ham wanted some cash to play with crypto’s??
Aishwin says
Congrats to Kevin Ham! By any chance can we know the exact number of domains and names?
Mark Thorpe says
Kevin’s Venture.com website still has some domains listed for lease on it.
John says
These bloggers aren’t going to dare write something about ETH.com for $2 mil. 😉
Tim says
If this keeps up I’ll eventually have the largest “private” portfolio in the world 😉
Peter W says
What happened with donuts? I remember meeting the ceo a few years back when the new tlds were making a splash and he was convinced it was going to be a bonanza for his company. Anybody know?
Peter