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As many of you know Archeo sold their Marchex portfolio of 200,000 domain names to GoDaddy.com for $28,000,000 last month.
The story was covered by many of the leading domain industry blogs such as DNW.com, DNJournal.com etc… At the time of the sale I was working on behalf of a client to acquire a domain name from Archeo, I cant disclose the domain name but I can let you know it was a one word dot-com domain.
We were going back and forth with Archeo and offered them various deals but they stuck to their guns and they said it was $20,000 all cash sale or no domain sale, This unfortunately was more than my client wanted to spend and it looked like the deal was over.
Fast forward one week and the story broke about GoDaddy buying the portfolio and my client said lets reach out to them again and see if anything has changed?
Well it would seem that GoDaddy are a lot more flexible on their pricing, We reached out to Afternic a company GoDaddy purchased in 2013 and start a line of communication with one of their representatives, Straight away the sales representative told me that the new owners are more reasonable on pricing then the previous owner, let me get you a price.
24 hours later – The price was $3,999, That’s a $16K drop on what we discussed with Archeo but the sales representative was happy to offer a further discount for a quick sale, we hit them back at $3K and got a reply with a link to close the sale.
Payment has been made and my client is in the process of having the name transferred over to them, GoDaddy.com seem keen on selling this portfolio at quick but fair prices, Yes they might be leaving some cash on the table with a $17K price difference from the original price quoted by Archeo but GoDaddy bought that domain for only $140 if you take an average sale price on the 200,000 domains acquired in that bulk deal and made $2860 off that one name in just a few days and I can guarantee that I am not the only one who shall have contacted Afternic and closed sales from this portfolio already.
The vast majority of the Marchex / Archeo portfolio was from legendary domain investor Yun Ye who sold his portfolio to Marchex for $164,000,000 now that looks like a loss on paper of $136 Million but the CEO as quoted on DNW.com states below they made a lot of money along the way with this portfolio.
In response to the portfolio sale, current Marchex CEO Pete Christothoulou told Domain Name Wire he still believes owning the domain names positioned the company for what it is today. He said the domain portfolio has generated $290 million in revenue excluding domain sales, and another $80 million in domain sales prior to the GoDaddy transaction.
“When you look at the amount of cash we’ve been able to generate from domain sales and what that’s done in terms of spawning [our mobile analytics business], we think we’ve gotten good value out of it,” he said.
GoDaddy.com will continue to make millions more from this portfolio it might not be as much as what Archeo / Marchex has made but with deals to be done this good news for the domain industry.
If you need to acquire a domain name please contact me to discuss my brokerage services in more detail.
Very interesting.
Wow. Great story Robbie!
Archeo priced domains higher to people in or connected to the domain name business. Once when acting on behalf of a friend, I was quoted two very different prices, one from an email clearly connected to the domain name business (if you Googled it) and the other not connected at all.
That is great, Godaddy can be relied upon to offer good discounts.