GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) has acquired 28 new top level domains from MMX, as well as the .Club and .Design top level domains.
The company is paying $120 million for the MMX strings. MMX, a publicly-traded new top level domain company had a market cap of £40 million. The MMX transaction will require shareholder approval and approval from some of MMX’s partners on some of the domains.
MMX’s two largest namespaces are .VIP at 900,000 registrations and .work 650,000 registrations. Somewhat surprisingly, the transaction includes MMX’s adult domains including .XXX.
The acquisition will help MMX get out from the public limelight. The company has struggled to grow registration and revenue numbers over the years as a small public company.
Financial details of the .club and .design transactions were not revealed. .Club was a single-domain TLD operator and .Design was owned by Top Level Design. .club has over 1 million registrations and .design has about 130,000.
GoDaddy entered the domain name registry business with its acquisition of Neustar’s registry business last year.
In addition to acquiring these strings, the company won the backend business for .basketball, rugby, and .ally.
After the acquisitions, GoDaddy will own, manage or operate more than 240 top level domain names.
Who could have seen this coming?
Remember, this is a Vertical integration, which not as frowned upon as Horizontals’
Samer
What a sham of an industry this is becoming. No one gives a c**p unless the .com price goes up by $0.000000001 and then they all start crying like babies.
Se you all in 10 years when GD owns most of the TLDs and says “ok folks..time to bend over”
in 10 years? The uTLD owners already did it. Did you forget when Frank raised the price 3,000% for some strings
In a way it’ll be good. There are far too many mediocre domains being held onto like they’re pure gold. Let many of them drop because they’re just too expensive to hold. Maybe a handful will be bought by people not willing to pay $thousands and they can be put to good use, the rest will cut off a healthy slice of registrar profits.
overpaying and wasting investor money, why not.
If the market cap is 40 mil, why did they pay 120 mil? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just buy a controlling share in the company stock? Or was the float too low?
I corrected the story to show the market cap was 40 GBP, not USD, so that’s about $55M USD. You can expect to pay a premium, but this still seems hefty. MMX will have to file details by the opening tomorrow, so there might be more details. Perhaps some of it is deferred. It might also include buying out some partners…we’ll have to see.
Should a company hang on to a domain if they’re not doing anything with it?
At some point, it might become simpler to list the companies that GoDaddy DOESN’T own than those it does.
True
New gTLDs are down 25% in the last six months and continue to nosedive. DotCLUB saw the writing on the wall and grabbed a golden parachute. Ironic, because dotCLUB is one of the healthiest of the 1,000+ new gTLDs.
Having a single company owning 200+ gTLDs is absurd.
The scope for long-term abuse is considerable.
Seriously where have you people been? You trying to say when Frank raised renewal prices 3000% on some gTLDs it wasn’t abusive? What’s abusive then? Raising renewals 4000%?