Company completed acquisition of rival domain sales platform last month.
According to a regulatory filing, GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) paid $71.4 million to acquire Dan.com.
The company filed its form 10-Q quarterly report today. In the subsequent events section, it stated:
In July 2022, we completed an acquisition for $71.4 million in cash.
GoDaddy announced the acquisition of Dan.com at the end of June, but it hadn’t closed yet. The deal appears to have closed in July because GoDaddy branding appeared on Dan.com’s landers last month.
Dan.com raised a multi-million dollar Series A round in 2020. The language of the original announcement made it seem like single-digit millions. If there were subsequent funding rounds, they were not announced to the public that I’m aware of.
By acquiring Dan.com, GoDaddy picked up a company that was siphoning off many of GoDaddy’s for-sale lander purchases. Domain investors are concerned that it might mean they’ll pay higher commissions in the future.
Mark Thorpe says
Drop in the bucket for GoDaddy.
Mark says
Exactly. Peanuts.
Squarely says
So how much money did Dan founders walk away with?
Andrew Allemann says
No idea. Depends a lot on how much they actually raised and what the terms were (e.g., liquidation preferences).
Mark says
Let’s play a game and guess. 51%. That’s $36.4M between the founders. They could have asked for more, it would have been worth $1B within 5 more years. I noticed the founder doesn’t reply to email about issues lately, so maybe they have moved on to new ventures.
MarkMajor says
Hopefully GD will not raise the commission. 20% for a landing page sale is ridiculous!
yooupi says
SWD COM landing page is free of charge
elpschulzo says
Here we are now …
J.R. says
For an registrar moving forward, add:
1) Customizable for-sale landers
2) single digit commissions
3) back order service for their in-house drops
4) maintain access to Fast Transfer funnel
Dan*com provided a great model for what domainers desire from sales lander, minus a registrar.
PageHowe.com says
the phrase “but where are the customer yachts” comes to mind………..
both to the sellers who helped build the dan value, and those who would have benefited from the hinted innovation, and those sellers who should also be rewarded with those wonderful 10 year badges at namescon. oh wait Godaddy wont be at namescon….
Paul Nicks says
Page, we’re always at NamesCon. We’re platinum sponsors this year.
$1 Domain Name says
hope godaddy keeps the old single-digit commission structure and also landing pages.
The Whale says
What would be the incentive for Godaddy to leave the 9% rate unchanged? Dan.com was a thorny competitor and Godaddy swooped in with their bag-o-cash and took them out.
Don’t be surprised if Dan is totally integrated into Godaddy within a few years – with same commission rate and same platform – with Dan.com simply forwarding to Godaddy.com. Think it can’t/won’t happen? Watch.
geekparty2008 says
Happened with Great Domains being bought by Sedo.
Anonymous says
Venture.com had a similar idea to Dan.com but Dan.com executed a lot better. With Venture you can only rent a domain name and I don’t think any business wan’ts to rent a domain name.
Mark says
71M USD, and GoDaddy valued 11.5 Billion. Looks like a bargain! probably 5x DAN gross profit? The 15% commission model with their lander is higher than the 9% one. And it’s 25% if not parking the lander with GoDaddy/DAN etc. It’s interesting GoDaddy aquired Uniregistry too. What is the alternative? With brokers. We’ve tried out a variety of non-afternic brokers… without any success. ps. So who will be acquired next, web.com?