Breaking News: GoDaddy appears to have acquired yet another domain name portfolio and this time appears to be Traffic Names LTD!
Update: GoDaddy’s Paul Nicks confirms the purchase with the statement:
We can confirm that GoDaddy has acquired another great domain name portfolio. This is a high quality portfolio and will help deliver customers their ideal name. The seller asked we keep their identity private, so we will not be disclosing that information.
This morning I started to detect Traffic Names LTD domains transferring over to GoDaddy’s NameFind portfolio.
Traffic Names LTD, which is owned by Ian Andrew of the UK, owns some great generics like Camera.com, which is now showing in whois as owned by NameFind LLC.
From what I see, the Traffic Names LTD domain portfolio contains around 30,000 domain names but right now it is unknown how many domains may be involved as I have only seen a small amount change between the two.
Some of the high value domains in the portfolio are:
- 14.com
- Camera.com
- Ads.com
- 224.com
- 452.com
- 492.com
- 605.com
- Pendants.com
- Printers.com
- OrganicFood.com
- Offices.com
The portfolio in general includes many make sense domain names like ChargeCard.com, LowPrices.com, ModelAgency.com, Bakeries.com, DieselFuel.com and Booklets.com to mention a few.
Further breakdown (all approximate)
- 77 ~ 3 character .com domains
- 44 ~ 4 character .com
- 800 ~ 1 word .com
- 17,000 2 word .com
- 7,900 3 word .com
This would be GoDaddy’s 5th domain name portfolio purchase, which started in April 2015 with the Marchex portfolio ($28M for 200K domains), Worldwide Media December 2015 ($35.5M for about 70K domains), DomainSource December 2015 (small purchase around 1,000 domains, purchase price unknown) and Elite Domains when DotWeekly broke the story + later breakdown in April 2016 ($42M for over 100K domains) . GoDaddy’s NameFind domain name portfolio contained about 400,000 domain names at that point. This portfolio, if in total as I expect, would bring that number up to about 430,000.
How much? Way too early to tell right now because these purchases are often calculated on volume + quality to set a per domain volume price. Still potential for a low $xx million if all 30K domains were involved. Let’s say a wholesale purchase price of $500/domain, which would total around $15M as an example.
Since this is breaking news, I will continue to add to this story as I do more research and hear back from the two parties. Ian is not likely to be able to comment due to a NDA but I would expect GoDaddy to confirm the purchase and I will update when/if they do (see update at top of the story).
They kept saying they aren’t buying anymore.
$500/name? Seriously?
Ben,
In general, that is how large portfolio deals are broken down. A per name value of $x. So for an example, Worldwide Media’s domain portfolio worked out to be right around $500 per domain. The Elite Domains portfolio, around $420 per name etc.
It is ridiculous to think a company buys 30,000 domains and will pay retail end-user pricing. GD is focusing on the quality domains not the bad ones.
I’m sure with GD’s next financial statement we will get an idea of how much this portfolio was bought for. They also just bought Host Europe Group and WPCurve, a WordPress premium services company.
Thanks for info
I assume this is the full list: http://www.dotcomagency.com/sitepages/categories.asp
They used to have a downloadable list on their website but I couldn’t find it.
They have a great collection of two-word domains. I remember seeing a lot of 5-figure sales from them on Afternic Apollo bug.
Nice acquisition. They just keep going like the energizer bunny buying up portfolios. And now they are closing a deal that make them the owners of NamesCon. Expect BIG things from Godaddy in the next 12 months or so. They are gearing up for something HUGE.