Hecta Media Acquires Large Domain Portfolio

Congratulations to Clark Landry and his team at Hecta Media on their recent portfolio acquisition. According to a news release on Forbes this morning, publicly traded Hecta Media (AIM Exchange) purchased a portfolio consisting of approximately 60,000 domain names for $1,450,000. They also retain the option to purchase two additional portfolios for $1,900,000. According to the release, the company expects revenues of $750,000 annually, which is important because the renewal fees will be over $400,000 per year (assuming they are all .com names). Based on my back of the napkin calculations, this is just over a 4 year revenue multiple.
I had the chance to meet with Clark Landry, CEO of Hecta Media, several months ago in New York, and he is a dynamic person, with an entrepreneurial spirit. When we were initially speaking, I had thought most large portfolios for sale with good names were significantly more expensive than what Hecta was able to pay for it. My advice to Clark would be to get pare down the portfolio of non-producing, poor names to save on the renewal fees. Sometimes you have but a bucket of rocks to find some gems.

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
  1. From my calculations, including their expected revenue and renewal costs, they paid a bit over 4 years’ revenue multiple, which isn’t bad – assuming the names aren’t sensitive.

  2. David, please expound on your insight.
    Michael, your insight also.

    Maybe Hecta can jusify the 1.45M purchase
    to it’s owners when it Owns 60,000 rowboats,
    of which there’s bound to be a few that really float well.
    If they paid 1.45M for a battleship ” Manicure.com “
    the owners (how many there are I do not know) might
    fire the ships cannons based on just ONE mega yacht(name).

    What think ye also Elliot?

    Teach me hear guys…Ed – Michigan

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    I emailed Clark to find out what some of the names are, but haven’t heard back. Without knowing this, I can’t say for sure. I know they’ve been looking to acquire a portfolio of names that receives traffic/revenue for a while, so I am sure they did their homework.
    However, like I told a friend last night who was contemplating buying 8 decent/good names for 6 figures, I would rather see him buy 1 great name for that price than several decent/good names. Having one great name is much more manageable than a bunch of good names.

  3. I think sifting through names to get to the bottom, is very important. I am planning to comb trough my names to cut out at least half next year. Eliot is as usual on the money, i probably wouldn’t have picked up some Battles ships (in my opinion) if it wasn’t for hundreds of raw boats.

  4. Hi Ed:
    One great developed name can outgross 50,000 parked names. Since 1995, my brother and I have experienced this time and time again. For example, the front page of our PalmSprings.com generates almost $1,000,000 a year in advertising revenue. We also see similar revenue from our Daycare.com. These are huge Geodomain and Mega-Generic domain names and would be expensive to purchase on the open market, but Hecta and Marchex could afford them. I don’t see why they don’t target mega names like these that have such super revenue potential instead of buying portfolios consisting of thousands of smaller parked names.

  5. David, thank you for the insight.
    Elliot, thank you for the response.
    Steve, thank you.
    Tim, thank you.
    Owen, good to hear from you again.
    Charley, thank you.
    You ALL teach me.
    I thot I loved REAL ESTATE.
    But this business gets in your blood !!
    Heck, if not careful this business IS your blood.
    Ed – Michigan

  6. Best guess is there’s a big lot of typos involved, thus the reason for not publishing.
    David, I think the “all your eggs in one basket” is one reason people buy “bunches of rowboats rather than a battleship”.

  7. Is there an update to this article
    about Hecta Media purchasing 60k
    domain names ??
    Is there a list somewhere – of all those 60k domains ??
    Is there a free – search tool where
    one could put in the NS and get all
    the domains hosted on that ns account ??
    Is there a CV online somewhere
    for: Clark Landry
    Thanks in advance…
    ~Patricia Kaehler – DomainBELL

  8. @ Patricia
    Why all the questions? Have you done any Google searching yet? You might want to try his company’s corporate site for info about Clark. They probably are keeping their domain names private though.

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