Ten days ago, GoDaddy announced it will be acquiring Uniregistry. The deal terms and value were not announced by either company, and I do not anticipate the exact details of the sale will be shared by GoDaddy, Uniregistry, or Uniregistry Founder Frank Schilling. It does appear that we now have a price range for the deal based on GoDaddy’s 2019 Annual Report.
Here’s an excerpt from the report that references the acquisitions GoDaddy recently made:
Uniregistry shared its weekly domain name sales report, and the company announced it brokered the sale of BTI.com for $100,000. The deal was co-brokered between Uniregistry and DomainBooth.com, the brokerage operated by James Booth. The domain was acquired by James Booth in September of 2019 for an undisclosed amount of money:
Todays Acquisition – https://t.co/idjzd2mgnh
— James Booth (@DomainBooth) September 2, 2019
GoDaddy had its Fourth Quarter (2019) earnings call with investors last week. Q4 2019 was CEO Aman Bhutani’s first quarter with the company, and it was his first time participating on GoDaddy’s earnings call. AlphaStreet.com published the transcript from Thursday’s earnings call, and I think it might be of interest to domain investors, particularly those who invest in GDDY stock.
Of particular interest, I think, is the discussion about why GoDaddy acquired Uniregistry. In Aman’s prepared notes, he first brought up the acquisition of Uniregistry, sharing some insights about what GoDaddy customers will be impacted by the buy and how:
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 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.
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:
