Synacor Sells Check.com

In its quarterly report that was published on August 12, 2014, Synacor reported a large domain name sale, and on its earnings call that followed, the company reported that the domain name it sold was Check.com. In the quarterly report, the company stated, “a $1.0 million pretax gain from the sale of a domain name no longer used in Synacor’s business.”

Based on the language in the quarterly report, the purchase price appears to be $1 million.

According to its website, Synacor is “the leading provider of next-gen startpages, award-winning TV Everywhere solutions and cloud-based Identity Management (IDM) services.” Based on the company’s description and corroborated by the information in the quarterly report, it does not seem like the Check.com domain name was helping the company, and being able to sell it for a significant amount of money makes sense in a situation such as this.

A Whois search shows that the owner of Check.com is a company based in Germany. At the present time, Check.com forwards to megaspace.de, which currently sits undeveloped. It will be interesting to see how the domain name will be used by the buyer.

Thanks to  George Kirikos  for the tip.

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

9 COMMENTS

  1. $1 million seems like a high price for that domain. I think they were lucky to get that much. It is not a crazy high price, but banking type checks are a dying business, and checks.com already has a huge business on the plural version, so due to either trademark issues or just plain confusion I don’t see how somebody could start a similar company on the singular version, even if they don’t sell checks but instead do something else check related.

    If it is instead for something like a credit check, background check, criminal records check, etc. then that seems like a much better fit, but I still don’t think it is worth $1 million for that type of thing.

    • Eric I think you are probably right about it not being about physical checks, “check” can mean so many other things.

      Depending on the buyers financials though it may have been a “must have” purchase which is always the dream of any domain seller… Remember when iReport.com sold for 750k? I’d say Check.com is a better name by a long shot.

    • I don’t think it was a bad deal for whatever company bought it, because it is worth spending whatever is needed to have a great domain for their product/service, but I think the domain had a market value that was a lot less than that. Of course the market value is whatever a buyer will pay, and they paid $1 million, but if it was my domain I probably would have sold for $100,000.

  2. The domain sold I believe was “CHEK.COM”, not “cheCk.com”.
    It was one of the companies (the other being mypersonal.com?) that merged to form Synacor some years ago.

  3. I know the new German owner of check.com. It’s a big comparision site and very well known in Germany. They are making a lot of money with comparision (affiliate marketing). It has nothing to do with bank checks.

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