I detected a domain portfolio acquisition by GoDaddy’s NameFind, and the news was confirmed to me by the company yesterday afternoon. GoDaddy acquired an unknown number of domain names from the Name.com / Rightside domain name portfolio, which I believe was sold by Donuts. Up until earlier this year, Name.com was owned by Rightside, a company that was recently acquired by Donuts. GoDaddy also informed me that the Name.com expiry stream will now go to auction via GoDaddy Auctions.
Nick Fuller, who is Director of Public Relations at GoDaddy, sent me the following statement from VP and GM of the Aftermarket at GoDaddy, Paul Nicks:
“We can confirm that GoDaddy has acquired domain names from Name.com. These names will help anyone looking to make a statement online. The domain names are a mixture of .com domain names as well as new tlds and will be added to the NameFind portfolio. We have also worked out an agreement with Name.com to add their domain names to our expiry auctions.”
The company did not tell me how many domain names were acquired, nor did they share the acquisition price. The company also didn’t share the volume of expiry auctions this will include. Depending on the size of the domain portfolio acquisition, it is very possible we will see it mentioned in a subsequent SEC filing or a quarterly report.
I also reached out to Donuts for a comment. “We’re very pleased to be working with GoDaddy. They’re a leader in the industry and a strong partner,” a spokesperson from Donuts told me.
At the time the Donuts acquisition of Rightside was announced, I wondered what Donuts would do with Name.com. We still don’t have an answer about the popular domain registrar, but we now know what the company decided to do with domain names that were owned by the company. I want to reiterate that GoDaddy did NOT acquire Name.com (the registrar or company).
Should I learn any more, I will be sure to update this.
Domain addiction. Lethal when it takes hold 😀
Goliath just got bigger.
Buy it is David and Goliath and not Goliath and David.
I really liked name.com’s closeout style daily price lowering buy now and instant account transfer expiring domains process. I would get alot of gems from them. GoDaddy is is just too crowded and hugedomains doesn’t let anything decent hit closeout
Great news, thanks for sharing. Good to see the GoDaddy expired auction inventory be expanded further. A shame that their expired domain stream partnership with Tucows was so short lasted (though it looks like they are not achieving the same results with NameJet, as they recently lowered prices, in an attempt to achieve similar results to what they did with GD).
Hope well see more registrars added to GoDaddys expiry stream shortly, espcially registrars with decent quantity and quality in terms of inventory, that currently do not have any kind of pre-release arrangement where names just go to pending delete (such as Cronon AG, Gandi, Annulet, Key-Systems, Rebel, Tierranet, etc.).
Bad news for those looking for deals on expired domains.
Anyone know of any gems this would have held
Name.com *used* to be a decent place to buy expired domains. As Rod said, great closeout system. But, for a long time now, expired name.com domains have FIRST gone to NameJet, and then the leftovers have gone through their own expired domain closeout system. For the past few months, there has mostly just been garbage at Name.com (this must have been obvious to anyone using name.com!?). The names I previously would have bought at Name.com I have bought and NameJet instead. So this is hardly a loss for name.com customers, as you were only getting the leftovers nobody wanted at NameJet. Personally I’d rather buy name.com expired domains at GoDaddy, with a $12 starting price, than at NameJet, with a $69 starting price…
The beginning of the end for Name.com? Kind of seems that way – looks like the site is abandoned or they just have the worst design/UI of all time… so out of date! What a terrible and untrusting looking website.
Great to see Godaddy Auctions expired inventory been extended. This will make it even harder for HugeDomains. Would they be better off just focusing on Pendings?
Map.com is a part of this acquisition.