According to a press release that was distributed yesterday, “Chegg acquired the data and assets of Internships.com for $10 million in cash and approximately $1 million in shares of Chegg Common Stock.” Clearly, this is not simply a domain name name sale, but rather the sale of a business that was established on an exceptional exact match .com domain name.
Chegg is a publicly traded company (ticker symbol CHGG on the NYSE) that specializes in textbook sales, college course assistance, and internship matching. Chegg was launched in 2005 and was officially founded in 2007. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013.
Internships.com is billed as the “world’s largest student-focused internship marketplace.” The press release stated that the acquisition “will add 2 million registered students, 380 university relationships, and 90,000 internships from 60,000 companies to the Chegg Career Center.” The company was originally founded in 1997 and relaunched around 2010.
One of the great things about a domain name like Internships.com is that a visitor knows exactly what to expect when they type it into their browser. I can only assume the branded domain name played a large role in the company’s growth.
Something that will be worth watching is to see whether Chegg decides to rebrand Internships.com under its own branding or keeps it operating under the Internships.com branding. In my domain acquisition research, I have found quite a few exceptional domain names like this one that forward to a page within an acquirer’s website. Despite having a great brand name, Chegg could opt to move Internships.com under the Chegg umbrella. To me at this time, it is unclear what their plans are for the branding of the website.
Thank you to Jim for sharing this news with me.
Great move by Chegg. Obviously, internships.com is the best domain by far for internships. And they will be building a database of internship users that are potential users of all of their other edu related offerings.
I guess that would explain some of the hits I’ve been getting on the .co.
It sort of seems under-priced once you add the website into the mix.
I was also thinking along those lines, but when you compare to Insure.com and other insurance EMD sales, it does fall along those lines. I would value those standalone names much more than Internships since those are far more transactional.
Chegg acquired StudentOfFortune.com and all of their tutors and members. That was probably much bigger than spending $11 million on Internships.com.
Didn’t Mike Mann used to own that domain? Thought I saw that website published on his DomainMarket. Maybe he owned it, may he didn’t. Anyone know the previous owner of Internships.com?