GoDaddy Acquires Another Domain Portfolio

I was looking through my daily Registrant Alert email from DomainTools, when I noticed what appeared to be another domain name portfolio acquisition by GoDaddy. A very large number of domain names that were privately registered at Uniregistry changed hands and are now registered to NameFind, the portfolio holding company owned and operated by GoDaddy.

I reached out to GoDaddy’s Paul Nicks, and he confirmed an acquisition. “Can confirm another portfolio purchase, but we wont be disclosing price or seller information,” he told me in an email this morning.

Some subsequent research using DomainTools Whois history tool shed some additional light on the acquisition, which Andrew Allemann wrote about this morning. As far as I understand, neither party is going to offer any comment or information about the deal. Unfortunately, this means that we will likely only know that GoDaddy acquired another portfolio and won’t learn details like the size, cost, or breadth of the acquisition. Since GoDaddy has made multiple portfolio acquisitions, the company’s SEC filings / quarterly report will likely not break out the acquisitions individually.

As an industry observer, it is a bit frustrating that more information isn’t being shared, but as someone who doesn’t disclose my company’s sales, I can totally understand. One thing we can learn is that GoDaddy is still buying portfolios so the company’s thesis about private premium domain name sales must be on point, and that is a good indicator of the market.