I noticed that quite a few domain names transferred to NameFind this morning from a company called Traffic Names, Ltd. The portfolio has many high value domain names, and my guess is that this  was an 8 figure acquisition. Jamie Zoch wrote about the acquisition earlier this morning.

After seeing the domain registrant changes and Jamie’s article, I sent an email to Paul Nicks, Vice President of the Aftermarket at GoDaddy. I asked him for an official comment about the acquisition, and I also asked him if the company acquired the entire portfolio or a portion of it. Here’s the official GoDaddy statement  about the acquisition:

“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.”

In addition to this statement, Paul also confirmed that GoDaddy acquired the entire portfolio. DomainIQ indicates that this is somewhere in the ballpark of 31,000 domain names. That figure doesn’t include names that could have a different email address associated with them or privately registered domain names.

If you have a look at DotComAgency.com (or the Archive.org version if the website is taken down), you can see quite a few of the domain names that GoDaddy likely acquired in this deal. Using DomainIQ, I found some of the top names in the portfolio:

Last year, it was announced that people could register Emoji domain names. Name.com (and others) wrote about how to register these domain names, although I have no idea how many Emoji domain names have been registered. There was also a fair amount of mainstream press that covered this news, especially when it came to Coca Cola’s usage of an Emoji domain name (a .WS domain name).

Earlier this week, GoDaddy launched a search engine to find and register available .WS Emoji domain names:  â¤â¤â¤.ws. Based off my recollection alone, there seems to be much more news this time, presumably because GoDaddy is  making it easier for people to find and register Emoji .WS domain names.

I am curious if you would ever consider registering an Emoji domain name if they were available in any extension. Personally, I am not much of an Emoji user. I add a  smiley face here and there in text messages, but that’s about it. I don’t think I would be a user, although if they were available in all extensions and there was a market for emoji url, I would probably invest.

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