This business model might look familiar.
The company that acquired IT.com for $3.5 million has a business plan that might look familiar.
Intis Telecom’s main business is SMS marketing. But it recently acquired it.com for $3.5 million on a payment plan. It paid $1.5 million upfront and is paying the rest off over three years. (James Booth represented the seller.)
It.com has nothing to do with the SMS business, however. The company is offering subdomains like example.it.com, with an emphasis on action words like explore.it.com and remember.it.com.
It plans to do this with lots of other domains. Over the past ten months, the company has acquired 10 ‘it’ domains in various extensions. But it.com is its biggest investment. Before this domain, the most it had paid was $25,000 for it.kz. (That’s the country code for Kazakhstan.) Update: The $25k was the most expensive this year. Last year, the company paid $235k for it.co.uk.
Selling subdomains was CentralNic’s business model many years ago, although it focused on domains that were very similar to country codes, such as example.us.com.
A challenge for businesses using a name like this is that they aren’t regulated by ICANN. There’s no recourse if the company that owns the second level domain decides to stop offering the service. CentralNic ended up doing just that with a number of the domains. It’s also worth noting that CentralNic offered its domains when there was a lot less choice for domain extensions.
What happens if they wake up one morning and decide to shut down it.com and create a more profitable information technology website?
I rather register my own domain email…
Not going anywhere.
Not worth it from an investing perspective, but smart on their end to help finance the ownership of it through getting end user approval. After which, they can keep maintaining it or drop it completely as it would “no longer be financially sustainable” (after having paid their debt).
Intis Telecom has been in business since 2010 and the past decade has seen us organically grow a loyal base of over two thousand enterprises who rely on us each day to deliver content to their customers around the world rapidly and accurately using a host of digital channels such as SMS and well-known business chat apps. Trust and reputation are built over many years and we have now added a new dimension to our business – IT.COM.
It’s not every day an opportunity like IT.COM comes along and we grasped it with both hands. We know how important a role great client engagement plays in building consumer trust and cementing client relationships and it’s a logical extension for us, to move into an area which can dramatically enhance the brand positioning of clients both old and new. After all, a memorable website name plays a huge role today in capturing the imagination of people and at the end of the day, it’s about being remembered ahead of the competition. A great website name helps immeasurably with that!
We’re very aware that the past decade has thrown up a couple of examples of less scrupulous organizations not exactly dealing with clients in a professional manner but we aren’t them. Whatever we paid for IT.COM (that’s on public record), our brand is worth far more than that and it would not be a prudent business decision to put that on the line and risk it in any way.
no mention of y.at
Running registries was always a good business, specially long term and the cashflow builds up.
Any idea why did Apple shut down me.com?