Confirmed: MLB Acquires Angels.com

The Angels.com domain name has been purchased by Major League Baseball, and Angels.com now redirects to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim website. The domain name was purchased at the end of August for $200,000 at a Sedo auction.

In my opinion, this was a smart acquisition for the baseball team, and it was a smart sale for the owner, who hasn’t been able to monetize the traffic that was presumably mostly looking for tickets, baseball gear, and other baseball related products. In 2007, Major League Baseball filed a UDRP for Angels.com, but they lost the decision. According to an article written by Andrew, the team was offered the opportunity to purchase the domain name back then for around $300,000.

As you can see from a prior post about sports team domain name, most professional sports teams (and leagues) understand the value of owning the team .com domain name. (Big exception: Dallas Cowboys who still down’t own Cowboys.com).

According to the most recent Whois update, the domain name is owned by MLB Advanced Media, LP, and the domain name is registered at Corporation Service Company.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

8 COMMENTS

  1. Look what they pay for players yet they are not a serious player without the domain name. As time goes on more and more organizations will come to realize the cost of NOT owning these domains is more than the cost to acquire it. COWBOYS.com too.

    We are in the early stages of a great awakening.

  2. why should the buyer’s ability to pay for a good/service (in this case, a domain name) impact the value of that good/service? just like a homeless person should not be able to purchase angels.com for $1, the deep-pocketed anaheim angels should not be compelled to purchase the name for $1mm, $10mm or more. did the angels negotiate a good deal – absolutely yes. but net worth of the buyer should not be used to evaluate whether the seller could/should have extracted more $ from the sale. i don’t get it.

  3. Well said Josh šŸ™‚

    Yes, they got Angels.com for a steal, $200k is virtually nothing to MLB or the Angels.

    I still chuckle when I recall the cowboys.com story (from domainnamenews.com) of how the deal fell apart when they thought they were buying the domain for $275.00 instead of $275,000.

  4. I agree that it’s a good deal for both parties. Yes it isn’t a lot of money to Major League Baseball. But the seller wasn’t monetizing it and hadn’t made it into a decent business, so 200k is a decent price for the seller considering that. So it’s good for both parties – which is the way it’s supposed to work. Congrats to both.

  5. Sorry, but while I agree the price was somewhat low, it was a bad purchase for MLB and a bad sale for the owner.

    Why? Well, IMO it’s much like the sale of toys.com. Initially Toyrus just redirected the domain to their main site, at least now toys.com is a portal for all their sites. But using a domain like that falls short of it’s potential I think. As a properly developed portal domain, toys.com has the potential for being the place just about everyone goes to staart their search for toys. Having listings for all toy companies, and paid ads for all toy companies would mean that toysrus would not only have as much free advertising as they wanted, but if they didn’t get a sale, they would still get paid…!!! Does hogging all the space and potential of a domain like toys.com REALLY give them a bigger advantage? I don’t think so. People will learn that toys.com is just toysrus and either use it or avoid it. They won’t go their to find the lowest prices, that’s for sure because it’s just one company.

    What has all this to do with Angels.com? Same idea. Angels are a little more than just about some baseball team. By taking a generic property like that, you squander all the potential for angel products and services. And angels are not limited to just one religion or nationality. I don’t know, maybe MLB has more money than the Catholic Church?

    If MLB was worried they were losing revenue from that domain and they asked me, I would have advised them to buy it, but make it about ANGELS and have good linkage to their existing properties for those that went to the site by mistake.

  6. Perhaps the net worth of a buyer should not be considered… but it is. That’s why we have proxies and brokers. The buyers are “compelled to purchase” for whatever reasons they have, and that plus their abilty to pay is what limits the price, along with what the seller considers the value to be and what they can get away with.

    The more something costs, the more you should protect yourself as a buyer. And the more research and investigating about your buyer you should do as a seller. When we get offers we find out much more about them than the buyer would ever want us to know.

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