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.
Drop in the bucket for GoDaddy.
So how much money did Dan founders walk away with?
No idea. Depends a lot on how much they actually raised and what the terms were (e.g., liquidation preferences).
Hopefully GD will not raise the commission. 20% for a landing page sale is ridiculous!
SWD COM landing page is free of charge
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.
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….
Page, we’re always at NamesCon. We’re platinum sponsors this year.
hope godaddy keeps the old single-digit commission structure and also landing pages.
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.
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.