On Monday, I posted an article about the sale of the True.com for $350,000. Dave Evanson and Negar Hajikhani of Sedo co-brokered the deal, and the company faced some criticism in the comment section related to the sales price. Although I think $350,000 for a domain name like True.com sounds like a good deal for the buyer, I don’t think it’s fair to comment about a deal when private details about the seller are not known.
I was able to find some more information about the company that sold True.com in a Wall Street Journal article from October of last year. In addition, I learned that the company that owned the True.com dating website, True Beginnings, LLC, filed for bankruptcy back in 2012, according to the Dallas Business Journal.
According to the WSJ article:
“A Canadian online dating site has pulled the plug on its offer to buy a bankrupt American rival after Texas’s attorney general warned that the sale would expose millions of singles to privacy risks.
A Canadian-owned dating site called PlentyOfFish on Wednesday withdrew its $700,000 offer for True.com, a Plano-based dating site that still possesses a database of tens of millions of customers.
The decision came days after Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office filed a petition to block True.com from selling its assets, which included its membership database and all information provided by True.com’s customers.”
A bankruptcy most likely complicated the sale of the domain name. There may have been time constraints put on the deal, and Sedo was likely working on the deal as instructed by its client, the seller of the domain name. Whatever the case is, those of us in the peanut gallery will likely never know the key drivers of this sale.
As far as I am concerned, the buyer got a good deal on a valuable domain name, and Sedo did a good job of connecting with TrueCar and making the deal happen. We are all free to draw our own conclusions, but I don’t think it’s really fair to be so harsh without knowing all of the facts.
The domain name itself received now probably higher valuation than in the previous $700K offer (if that one was mainly about a large existing customer base).
I would agree with your assessment, but that is a matter of opinion and I don’t know the value of dating website customers.
Does anybody know how much it sold for in 2004?
Sure. Still, the database seems to have been 43 million members heavy.
Btw., according to the new website under True.com, it´s not about rebranding or redirecting TrueCar.com