Annual report shows that deal was for less than $200 million.
We now have a better idea of how much GoDaddy paid to acquire Uniregistry and Frank Schilling’s domain name portfolio.
GoDaddy issued its annual report today. The report states:
In February 2020, we entered into agreements for two acquisitions with an aggregate purchase price of approximately $196.9 million, of which $149.1 million has been paid in cash. The remaining $47.8 million will be paid upon receipt of certain regulatory approvals and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions as well as upon the expiration of the contractual holdback period.
It’s unclear if both of these acquisitions are Uniregistry or if it includes another company. GoDaddy also acquired South African social content startup Over and that is included in the total.
My guess of $100MM is looking better and better from comments in original article is looking better and better
It is looking too high (if you are talking about the portfolio only) Pretty much everyone was way too high (myself included) except for the guy who said $50million and was jeered for saying it.
It’s going to be a strong domain portfolio purchase due to accounting. IMO they’re going to write a per name at 200$ or less and give a lot of value for the platform/technology.The platform and tech means nothing to them and they’ll end up writing it off.
I agree on the allocation economics setting a low basis for the domains and booking gains on sales.
However, the word is that domainers will be migrated to Uniregistry’s platform post acquisition.
If that info is accurate, it seems Godaddy values the tech and arguably acquired a development program.
We’ll see how it plays out but I don’t think it is right to say they did not value the tech.
The domains are the easy flip for the financial engineers but I do think Aman needed a dev team.
I figured it was between $100-200 million. GoDaddy is too cheap to pay more than $200 million.
But is it worth more than $200 million, of course it is $300-500 million IMO.
Thought $1B+ to buyout his life’s work…
Over was a fairly large company. They talked about it a fair bit in the earnings call. More than 100 employees.
5:08 – 6:45 here: https://www.domainsherpa.com/brandsight-uniregistry/
Hindsight is a bitch. There were multiple nine figure offers for Frank’s portfolio back in the day:
https://dnjournal.com/cover/2007/december.htm
He also put in about $60 million on gtlds, which didn’t seem to pan out. It blows my mind that he put so much money and effort into building this big operation, but then it sold for a fraction of the previous offers. I guess that’s the Great Recession for you.
$60 million in new tlds? How do you figure?
Widely reported at the time:
https://www.cnet.com/news/here-comes-the-greatest-internet-landgrab-in-history/
$10 million in application fees alone by my calculation.
I imagine he got quite a bit of that back in auctions