Speculating on the Uniregistry Acquisition Price

Since the news about GoDaddy buying Uniregistry broke yesterday, there has been a lot of speculation and discussion about the purchase price. Although the price doesn’t really matter all that much to anyone beyond any Uniregistry stakeholders (like Frank Schilling) and GoDaddy shareholders, of course it is natural for people in the domain space to want to know how much was paid to buy the assets. I would love to know how much value Frank built over the last couple of decades in the business.

I don’t think we will really get an idea about the price until GoDaddy files a quarterly report. It will likely not be reported until the 2020 Q2 quarterly report is filed since the deal is scheduled to close in the second quarter of this year. In past filings, GoDaddy has lumped all of its acquisitions together in one line item, so if the company makes other acquisitions in the quarter, we may never get an idea of the acquisition price.

Instead of posting a poll here to ask what people think the purchase price was, I will share the Twitter poll from Rick Schwartz asking the same question:

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

16 COMMENTS

  1. Just back of the napkin type math, but let’s give this a shot.

    Namesilo, a registrar with twice as many names under management, is probably worth around $40m. Uni has around 1.1m names under management, but 350k of those are presumably Frank’s, so more like 750k. So let’s say that that business is worth around $10m. That’s probably giving them some credit for the technology too.

    Frank seemed to be selling around $25m in names a year. Renewals would cost around $3m a year and he was buying names to replenish that inventory too, so maybe another $2m. If I were GD, I wouldn’t pay more than 2x yearly net revenue for a portfolio of that size, so that’s $40m.

    So I’d peg this at about $50m. I think Rick is really just hyping things up a bit with those poll options.

    • They paid Berkens $35M for 70K names, no technology, no sales channel, no data, no Brandsight.

      Your calculation makes no sense, all they had to do was do a mass email, and set everything to BIN and they could have raised $40M in a few months.

  2. Yeah, that’s probably a bit low.

    The sales channel is worth something. I believe they said they were doing about 50m a year in sales through the marketplace. Past data dumps had about half that value being Frank’s sales, so that would mean around $25m. Who knows what percentage of those are self managed 0% commission sales though.

    I think Berkens had a better portfolio. He had a lot of 3 letter .coms that were doing really well at the time. Berkens got around $500 a domain.

    If that’s the top, then:

    $500/d = $175m
    $400 = $140m
    $300 = $ 105m
    $200 = $70m
    $100 = $35m

    The problem with looking at averages is that a lot of the domains will never be sold. Maybe if you priced the whole thing at $200 a pop Hugedomains would buy it though 🙂

  3. My opinions only.

    Distressed sale due to personal issues, had to liquidate. No buyers at these ranges other than GD.

    Under 100$ per name + tech.

    50M – 85M

    • Frank is crystal clear that this isn’t a home run.

      “You can go big or go home,” Schilling added. “And I’ve made a cognizant decision to go home”

      The thing to remember is life happens. Sometimes it’s time to move on and there’s nothing wrong with that.

  4. i say $170MM…
    i am assuming it was a forced sell
    because of divorce
    new gtlds failure
    renewal costs
    expenses
    lifestyle bills piling up
    had to liquidate ASAP
    my guess $170MM

  5. A domain registrant is worth 3 to 5$, platform/brand/etc has some sort of value, software/tech I’ve no idea what Uni had as never used them, but some special proprietory magic could be worth a bit, so lets say 10 million for the registry business, for the portfolio/income 100 to 200m, X for the staff/locations/assets – adding it all up ~300m would be my guess

  6. Berkens 70,000 domains sold for 35 million
    Marchex 200,000 domains sold for 28 million
    Kevin Ham’s 100,000 domains and Donuts 200,000 domains sold for a combined 50 million

    Knowing that Schilling needed out probably because of his divorce and that gave the advantage to Godaddy to get a good deal.

    I’m slashing my original 100 million price to 60 million for the portfolio and another 15 million for Uni. 75 million total for everything.

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