Oversee.net

Oversee just announced that the company closed a deal on Data.com this morning “for an amount that significantly exceeds the $1.5 million reserve.” Andrew already reported that the buyer is publicly traded company, Salesforce.com.

Personally, I don’t like to see a company remove domain names from public auctions but I guess they felt it was in the best interests of the seller (and them) to do so. If there were other potential buyers that did due diligence on the domain name and perhaps didn’t want to let Oversee or others know of their interest to keep a low profile, this wouldn’t really be fair to them since they wouldn’t have a chance to bid on the domain name.

In any event, congratulations to the three parties on what will likely be a public sale if Salesforce.com needs to report it with its other public disclosures.

In other news that was also announced in the same email, this sale brought the total revenue “for the aftermarket division of Oversee.net to more than $11 million.”  This is a significant number for the company, and assuming they weren’t the seller of the domain name, it likely translates to a little more than $1.5m for the company.

The DomainFest live auction in Barcelona will be held tomorrow, and bidding can be done via Snapnames.

Today at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer-focused conference in San Francisco, Google announced its new cloud music service, which is called Music Beta. The service is currently in private mode, and is invite only, but that will likely change very soon.

The owner of MusicBeta.com is “Oversee  Domain  Management,  LLC”, a company operated by domain industry conglomerate, Oversee.net. It appears that the company has owned this domain name since at least 2007, according to the Whois history tool.

Assuming Google wants the domain name, negotiations could get pretty interesting. I believe Oversee’s domain parking provider, Domain Sponsor, uses a Google feed that likely produces tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue for both companies and partners. When you have such an important relationship, these types of negotiations can be tricky.

Oversee would seem to be in a very good position here, since the domain name is descriptive in nature and they’ve owned it well before Google chose the brand name for its new service. As such, Oversee should be able to continue monetizing the domain name with targeted, music-related pay per click links. However, Google does seemingly control the revenue the parked name will earn 🙂

I have a feeling Music Beta is going to be big, and Google is going to feel the need to acquire the domain name due to the volume of direct navigation traffic. It should be interesting to see how this all plays out.