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:
What do you think was the final sales price for @Frank_Schilling portfolio?#Domains #Domain #RealEstate #Branding #Marketing #GTLD #Advertising #ads #Property #properties
— Rick Schwartz 👑 The DomainKing® 👑 Since 1995 (@DomainKing) February 12, 2020
500M+ min. amt. exceeds most recent buyback.
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.
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 🙂
Sedo will be one to watch
Price for me $270m + % targets
Nobody needs a Domain King
My opinions only.
Distressed sale due to personal issues, had to liquidate. No buyers at these ranges other than GD.
Under 100$ 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.
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
I wouldn’t call 170 million a liquidation.
zero idea…pure guess…70 million
i assume no patents, ip, etc were part of the deal…if so, add in earnouts
Would say around $100 million for the portfolio only – (which is what Ricks poll is about). No idea what Uni could be worth.
I was the first to say100 million for the portfolio in your original post and I’m sticking with that number.
A domain registrant is worth 3 to 5$, 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
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.