Frank Schilling

Coronavirus.com is Owned by GoDaddy

One of the top news stories the past several weeks is the Coronavirus outbreak that has been making people sick throughout the world. Officially known as COVID-19, the novel coronavirus has sickened over 80,000 people and killed nearly 3,000 people. The continuing spread of the coronavirus is a scary situation that seems to be getting worse each day. It has also caused concern for people around the world who are searching online to learn about coronavirus and want to protect themselves from becoming infected.

I was curious to see who owns Coronavirus.com. I can see the domain name is registered to an entity called NameFind Cayman Islands LTD. As mentioned in an article yesterday, this company is associated with GoDaddy, so effectively, GoDaddy owns Coronavirus.com.

NameFind Cayman Islands LTD. Registrant of Name Administration Domains

While looking through my DomainTools Registrant Alert email yesterday morning, I noticed domain names from Frank Schilling’s Name Administration Inc. transferred to a company called NameFind Cayman Islands LTD. The domain names are still registered at Uniregistrar Corp. (Uniregistry). I assume GoDaddy created this entity in the wake of its deal to acquire Frank Schilling’s company and the reported 350,000+ domain names in Frank’s portfolio.

GoDaddy has a domain name portfolio holding company called NameFind LLC. As far as I am aware, the bulk of domain names acquired by GoDaddy in various portfolio deals have moved into the NameFind LLC account. The NameFind LLC company has a mailing address in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the same address as Afternic’s office.

NameFind Cayman Islands LTD. has a Whois registrant address in the Cayman Islands:

Speculating on the Uniregistry Acquisition Price

Since the news about GoDaddy buying Uniregistry broke yesterday, there has been a lot of speculation and discussion about the purchase price. Although the price doesn’t really matter all that much to anyone beyond any Uniregistry stakeholders (like Frank Schilling) and GoDaddy shareholders, of course it is natural for people in the domain space to want to know how much was paid to buy the assets. I would love to know how much value Frank built over the last couple of decades in the business.

GoDaddy to Acquire Uniregistry + Name Administration

GoDaddy announced a major corporate acquisition in a press release this morning. GoDaddy will be acquiring Uniregistry, the company founded and operated by Frank Schilling. Uniregistry operates a Cayman-based domain name registrar and domain name brokerage platform. GoDaddy is also acquiring Name Administration, a related entity, which owns a portfolio of more than 350,000 domain names. GoDaddy is not acquiring Uniregistry’s domain registry, which operates 26 new gTLD extensions.

Portabellas.com Acquired for Progressive Super Bowl Commercial

During the run up to this evening’s Super Bowl, Progressive Insurance ran a television commercial featuring its “employees” Flo and Jamie in the role as a waiter and waitress at a fictitious restaurant called Portabella’s. The Progressive Super Bowl advertisement caught my attention because of a generic domain name that was featured in it:

Towards the end of the commercial, you can see the Portabellas.com domain name prominently marketed. That caught my attention because I remembered seeing the domain name transfer very recently in my DomainTools Registrant Alert email from January 25, 2019:

My Experience with Uniregistry’s Domain Liquidity

I wrote about Uniregistry’s Domain Liquidity initiative last week. I shared that I like the idea of the program even though the exact details about how it will work are a bit sparse right now. I decided to try out Domain Liquidity to see how it works and share my results with you. The program is in its beta phase, and I think this has the potential to be a positive for domain investors.

I submitted a list of 208 domain names for review. (I posted the list in a screenshot below). There were a few one word .com domain names, a couple of .CO domain names, a couple of new gTLD domain names, and plenty of 2 and 3 word .com domain names. I wanted the list to be diverse to really get an idea of the types of domain names that were of interest and the offers for each of them. I don’t really want/need to sell inventory for wholesale prices right now, but I was open to sell if the offers were good enough, and also importantly, I would learn more about this initiative.

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