In last week’s sales report from Afternic, Adopted.com was the third largest reported sale, closing at $15,525. Although the registrant information is private, the doman name now forwards to IWasAdopted.com.
According to a cached page on the Buy Domains website, Adopted.com was listed for sale on the Afternic DLS network without a price. What likely happened is the buyer inquired about the domain name via a broker at Afternic, and they were able to put together the deal.
IWasAdopted.com seems to be a pretty neat website in a small niche market. The company helps adopted children re-connect with family members, including siblings and birth parents. The site boasts well over 200,000 member profiles, and it’s a subscription based site.
Clearly, Adopted.com is a great upgrade for them.
Thanks to Alan Dunn for sharing this with me.
Very reasonable price paid, seems the buyer got the better end of that deal.
@ Ron
I do think $15k+ is still a bit expensive because it’s a past tense term. It fits perfectly for this company though.
@elliot… seriously. a subscription based website with over 200,000 members for $15,000… seems like an inside the park home run to me.
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Actually, IWasAdopted.com is much more interesting and compelling than Adopted.com.
However, I do realize that, from a traffic standpoint, Adopted.com is a great acquisition for this company.
🙂
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I have to agree with most commentors, $15,000 is a steal for a site with 200,000 users.
@ Bob
Does the size of the buyer’s company really matter, especially when it comes to blind negotiations (assuming the former owner didn’t know who was buying it)?
Hi everyone,
I am the owner of Adopted.com.
I was Googling my new domain name to see what comes up, and I found your thread. Very interesting! I felt honored that my little site got a discussion going about domain purchasing.
To answer some of the questions here, I have been running Iwasadopted.com since 2005, and I currently have over 230,000 registrations. The site began as Iwasadopted.com, and Adopted.com was purchased simply as an empty domain.
This summer when I came across Adopted.com for sale I was quite surprised. Then when I inquired about the price I was shocked again as it was within reach! I quickly gave them the full asking price, as this website is my life’s work, and clearly a name like Adopted.com is pretty great. 😉
The price was strictly for the domain only. Everything you see at Adopted.com was built and cultivated over the past seven years at Iwasadopted.com. Today I had a look to see where my development cost are sitting now and was really surprised at the numbers. I have invested many hundreds of thousands in programming and advertising.
I’m being open about this information as your blog seems to be for people who are interested in building online businesses, which of course I relate to.
As a side note, it is becoming extremely hard to offer a good service for a good value in a climate where people expect everything to be free. There are some Adopted.com knock-off sites starting up that are willing to offer the site for free, but they don’t of course offer the level of customer service I offer or the full set of features and size of database to search. Still, it’s a little unnerving how people really are starting to expect things for nothing. At least once a week I get a message like, ‘How can you CHARGE for this service? Bloodthirsty money grubber!’ Brutal. It’s a fair and honest business, but the mindset has really changed.
There’s my two cents worth. Good luck to everyone with your ventures!