After discovering the latest domain name portfolio purchase by GoDaddy, I have yet to have a good idea of the size and quality of the domain portfolio purchase. The light is starting to shine a little brighter now though!
The elephant is the 23 confirmed 2 letter .com domain names acquired in the portfolio with the potential for that number to climb to 26.
It is a big process to transfer ownership of all these domain names, so it takes time. It has only been 4 days since I first discovered the domain portfolio buy and only 9 days since GoDaddy did the purchase. The good news for GoDaddy, the vast majority of the domain names were already registered with GoDaddy! The hard thing for me? Nearly everything was under whois privacy.
How many domains total?
So far, over 110,000 domain names are involved in this transaction that I have seen. That number is likely getting closer to 112K in general but could still easily climb.
37,152 domains moved (changed name servers from RookDNS to NameFind) on Thursday, 73,090 changed on Friday. That is 110,242 domains for those two day. A little over 1,000 moved in some fashion starting on the 5th but some of those were registrant changes that I noticed first. So right now, it’s over 110K domains. This number holds the chance to grow some more.
What other domains are included?
Some of the tools I use to see all these domains are limited. I could see the 73,090 number but was only able to see 60K actual domains of those 73,090. So the following is a general idea breakdown and not exact by any means!
23 ~ 2 letter .com domains
10,424 ~ 1-4 letter/number domains. 591 are .com, 2,821 are .net
780 ~ English word domains. 136 of those are .com’s
What are some of the best one word domain names?
- Belgium.com
- Backhoes.com
- Belly.com
- Fetus.com
- Fragment.com
- Headers.com
- Bands.com
- Casandra.com
- Catherine.com
- Carol.com
- Alexander.com
- Delaware.com
- Lung.com
- Making.com
- Nail.com
and plenty more!
8,932 ~ 2 word .com domains (13,320 total)
12,587 ~ 3 word .com domains (15,090 total)
Is there “junk” in the portfolio? Yes, just like nearly all large domain name portfolios, many would be considered junk. There are a lot of very good generics, a ton of “chips”, single letter, 2 letter and number, 3 letter and number, 4 letter and number, 5 letter and number etc.
How Much Money?
Well, I am not even sure on the total number of domains yet, so it’s still too early!
Marchex $28 Million and was about 200,000 domain names
Worldwide Media $35.5 Million and was about 70,000 domain names
DomainSource $? amount of domains, smaller, but likely around 1,000
If I had to guess, I would say this portfolio purchase price was higher than Berkens Worldwide Media portfolio, with the potential of being nearly $40-$65 Million. To get this number, I factored $500/domain ($55 Million) + $10 Million just for the 2 letter .com’s. The per domain could be a little lower than Berkens, because IMO, his portfolio contained less junk.
So this portfolio purchase by GoDaddy is very likely the highest amount it has paid to date! The domains may still be transferring in, so I will continue to monitor.
Great analisys Jamie! I think you got your numbers very close to the final deal price. Which tools did you use to monitor such a large portfolio transfers?
DomainIQ.com, DomainTools.com are the main two sources I use via registrant monitor. Domain name server changes is another source to track, running bulk whois scans, watching update dates, general digging around and simply watching activity with what is selling, who owned it etc.
Great work Jamie..
Some great GEO, and 2L.com’s come on, what a great portfolio. I would assume they would be approached for maybe stock, you would think owning so many 2L.com’s which are so liquid cashflow would not have been an issue, somebody clearly wanted an exit.
Wonderful research work. Best blog man.
Thank you
Great info.
Nice work
Why didn’t this company just sell their 2 letter dot com? We’ve be seen so many sell at high prices. They could have easily unloaded their best domains with hiring the right domain brokers.
Maybe selling an entire portfolio is an easy way to cut operating cost of annual registrations. It cost them 7 figures to renew. Selling this portfolio lined their pockets and gave them newfound freedom.
Since we really do not know who owned the portfolio, it may have been a way for a group of investors to cash out. Without those 2L’s maybe the portfolio looks less attractive? or it may have been for other reasons not even tied to the portfolio sale.
Great research Jamie. I really like Delaware and Belgium. I don’t like we compete against GD for names now. 🙂 Your thoughts?
GoDaddy buying these domains is a good thing IMO! The are listing most with Buy Now pricing and the prices are not crazy. (at least a fair amount less than the past owners would sell at)
I see Godaddy and Endurance(BuyDomains) buying portfolios, wondering if those are the only ones in the market. There cant be many more sellers with such large portfolios (over 50,000 names). There are many who own 1000-5000 domains though.
With all the talk of not enough .com available in the market, this could help that quite a bit.
Some pretty shrewd business moves over the last year for GoDaddy, in my opinion. They’re the largest domain registrar, one of the largest hosting providers, and within the last 12 months they now have one of the largest and arguably the top domain name portfolio in existence.
Premium domain sales and GoDaddy’s core business go hand in hand with one another. I’m surprised they haven’t done this all along.
To me, it’s similar to a coffee house customer coming in for a black coffee and giving them the option of upgrading to a latte or frappuccino and a pastry. Very different products but the point is they already have the customers, infrastructure and network to make these bets pay off.
More domains translates into more potential customers coming to GoDaddy. Even if they don’t purchase the first domain they were interested in, they may purchase another, or a different product altogether.
Only time will tell how this affects the smaller domain portfolio holders. If GoDaddy moves a lot of good domains at lower prices, smaller sellers could see less sales as a result. Many of these domains were difficult (or nearly impossible) to acquire in the past.
If ~400,000 domains are now all priced and readily available… We have to remember that a customer typically has multiple domain options, so those who have comparable domains for sale need to either have better visibility for their domain, a better domain in general, better pricing, or be better at selling a lesser quality domain in order to get the sale.