Marchex, Inc. today announced the sale of the bulk of its domain portfolio for aggregate proceeds of $34.8 million, as well as additional earn-out considerations. The $34.8 million total includes a $28.1 million transaction detailed below, as well as $6.7 million in direct domain sales by Marchex since January 2015.
The company has entered into a definitive agreement to sell more than 200,000 domains to GoDaddy Inc., the world’s largest technology provider dedicated to small businesses. Under the agreement, Marchex received cash consideration of $28.1 million upon closing plus additional earn-out payments subject to certain sales targets.
“Our complete focus is on establishing Marchex as the world’s leading mobile advertising analytics company,” said Pete Christothoulou, Marchex Chief Executive Officer. “A significant and growing majority of the consumer engagement and sales driven by mobile advertising happens offline, such as through phone calls. Narrowing our focus on this opportunity, while growing our balance sheet, strengthens our ability to continue delivering technology solutions that bring accountability to mobile advertising and transform business performance for our clients.”
GoDaddy ought to be better positioned to sell those domains than Archeo / Marchex has been.
And this should help legitimize the business of domain investment. If the mainstream press covers this, then there are 2 obvious conclusions they should arrive at:
1. Domains are worth big money.
2. Domain resale is a legitimate activity, good enough for a Super Bowl advertiser to engage in openly.
I have to agree. Go daddy is not just a super bowl advertiser. It just had its IPO.
But Marchex paid Yun Ye $164M for its portfolio.
This is not the complete Yun Ye portfolio. This is probably the worst of those domains. Marchex has been selling for years. Despite that, yes probably GoDaddy got a deal at this price.
This is at least 90% of their portfolio if I read the numbers right. 200,000+ domains sold and Marchex has 220,000 or so. I don’t like this deal for Marchex.
That portfolio was never really good for selling purposes. Most domains had traffic but now parking is not doing well. This is second tier domains being sold to go daddy.
I disagree. Beijing.com, Futbol.com, Destination.com, Saving.com, Deportes.com and many more like them are hardly second tier.
These are good but how many out of 200000 are like that? Are you sure you are getting Beijing.com?
The Yun Ye portfolio was only about 100k names. Marchex bought many more after that (many of them junk).