This is the second in a series covering the top stories on DNW in 2017, as ranked by pageviews.
In April 2015 GoDaddy made waves when it acquired Marchex’s domain name portfolio for $28 million. The registrar, which helps domain investors buy and sell domain names, was suddenly a domain investor itself. And it was about to become an even bigger one.
The company has purchased many domain portfolios since then, which suggests that being a domain investor is proving to be profitable for the registrar.
GoDaddy’s acquisition activity heated up again this fall. The company paid $50 million to buy two large portfolios: Donuts sold a portfolio of about 200,000 domain names it inherited from Rightside, and a portfolio linked to Kevin Ham that contained roughly 100,000 domains was also gobbled up.
The company followed up with a small purchase of select name from Tucows’ YummyNames portfolio.
GoDaddy typically buys domain names from portfolio holders who have low turnover and high sales prices. The company then attaches lower fixed prices to the domains and adds them to its AfternicDLS system to increase deal flow.
They are definitely on a roll buying back domain names that have been assessed by veteran investors and declared to have value.