Domain Movers: + Something New!

A lot of people love the Domain Movers series and I am thankful for that. I also keep trying new things and want to continue to provide unique content that is helpful to the domain industry with a focus on corporate domain name transactions. So today, I tried something a little new at the end of today’s report.

StarterCard.com has been acquired by a currently unknown MarkMonitor client from GenericDomainMarket.com. The domain name had an offering price of $1,999.

Biogaran registered Quotizen.net and Quotizen.com is offered for sale on BrandBucket with a purchase price of $2,200 but may not be for long.

Winston & Strawn LLP have shown up in whois records for FinancesDiscover.com, coming out of whois privacy at Fabulous.com and the domain name transferring to CSC Corporate Domains.

GreenLaces.com has been acquired by a currently unknown CSC Corporate Domains client. The domain name was acquired via Afternic and has been registered since 2007.

PepsiCo registered PepsiZeroSugar.com the day after several soda tax voting measures were approved. They also registered domains relating to FritoayMultipack.com and LiptonMeals.com and LiptonMeal.com

GoDaddy was busy selling domain names out of its investment domain name portfolio and sold 2, 3 letter .com domains. Those were ECL.com and AJP.com. Both showing Lowcrest Marketing as the new owners. GreenVision.com was sold to LED company Saco. Green Vision is a very popular term with a lot of companies using the term in its domains. They also sold TravelLight.com to Data Paradigm, Inc. and NewCalifornia.com to mention a few.

Dole Food Company appears to be joining the Virtual Reality in some fashion and registered DoleVR.com and Dole-VR.com

Heineken International B.V. registered the domain name RaiseATiger.com

Transport Accident Commission registered the domain name RethinkSpeed.com

Ledunfly SA has acquired the domain name TheEighteen.com from HugeDomains. The domain had an offering price of $1,995.

Marksmen assisted a currently unknown client acquire the domain name Flostat.com

Continental AG has acquired the domain name Voicr.com and used Escrow.com for the transaction. The domain has been registered since 2006.

Something “new”

I wanted to play around in some SEC filings of quarterly reports for publicly traded companies. This is the first time I have done this, so I’m still learning. I have the knowledge and skills to do it, I just have to learn the ropes a bit better. This is how Vivo.com was recently found that sold for $2.1M as reported, researched and dug by George Kirikos of Leap.com and displayed on his Twitter feed.

Sadly, many SEC reports that even mention domain names, mention a “domain sale” or “gains from a domain name” often pluralizes and kills the moment! It kills the moment because even though financial data is provided, it’s not broken down to what domain name or what specific domain names sold for. Also to note, domain purchases are easily hid in “acquisition” costs and not always singled out and mentioned.

Here is one example though of one I picked to research:

QuinStreet’s 10-Q for the 3rd quarter for 2016 shows “Gain on sales of domain names” as 143 and is listed (in thousands). So for Q-3 2016 QuinStreet sold $143,000 worth of domain names they considered not “strategically important to our business”.

So what domain names did they sell? Here is where the detective digging work comes into play. There isn’t a single place to go to find this data and I have to dig using many different resources. It is very easy to “miss one” or assume one was sold and it actually wasn’t. Keep in mind that whois records are not perfect and also do not always tell the entire story.

With the above said, here are my findings:

Stroud.com was one I seen move out, but is listed for sale now under whois privacy, so ownership is unclear but likely sold. 9/6/2016 whois changed

Fundz.com I seen move out, owned now by Margin International as of 7/19/16

innergy.com moved out, whois data didn’t change (see, it can be tricky) but name servers did and resolves to a company called innergy. 7/7/2016 domain name servers changed. To note, I had seen a listing on Afternic for this domain for $19,500

Educated guess puts most of the $143,000 towards the Fundz.com domain sale.

How about the prior quarter for QuinStreet? Similar results with “Gain on sales of domain names”reporting of 160. “Proceeds from sales of domain names 135. So after commissions, they took in $135,000.

Also to note, the filing stated: “Other income, net decreased $2.9 million, or 96%, for the nine months ended March 31, 2016, compared to the nine months ended March 31, 2015. This was primarily due to a decrease in gains on the sale of domain names that were not considered to be strategically important to our business of $3.2 million.” So the prior nine months resulted in some bigger domain sales for QuinStreet.

Keep in mind that QuinStreet isn’t considered a “domain business”, these are simply assets they own and sell from time to time. They own about 9,000 domain names and some real gems like Insurance.com, Insure.com, Developer.com, Schools.com and many financial related domains.

It is always very important to note, not all domain sales are publicly reported. DnJournal is fantastic and provides extremely valuable data, as does NameBio…. but these reported domain sales they provide are really just the tip of the iceberg of most domain name sales. Especially the big ones!