In October of this year, Andrew Allemann reported that Media Options acquired the Zoom.com domain name and had filed a trademark to launch a concierge domain name acquisition and consulting service. Andrew also reported that Media Options acquired the domain name from domain investor Andy Booth.
In lieu of launching the domain industry service, Media Options sold Zoom.com to Zoom Video Communications, a video conferencing company. Zoom.com now forwards to Zoom’s website, which can be found on the Zoom.us ccTLD domain name. I would not be surprised to see the company shift its website, social channels, and email to Zoom.com at some point in the near future.
Andrew Rosener, CEO of Media Options, declined to share the sale price for this domain name. He confirmed that the domain name was sold and told me via email, “I can’t say anything other than it was a great outcome for everyone and we will be rebranding our Zoom Domain service to another brand soon!”
My guess is that it was a seven figure deal, but I don’t know for certain. Should Zoom file IPO paperwork to go public, it is possible the purchase price will be revealed in a S-1 filing.
The Zoom.com domain name is registered under Whois privacy at Uniregistry, so I can not independently confirm a sale/transfer at this time.
According to Crunchbase, Zoom has received funding in the amount of $145.5 million. In its Series D fundraising round in early 2017, the company reportedly had a pre-money valuation of $900 million.
Acquiring Zoom.com is a big win for the company. I can imagine Zoom had to constantly market its Zoom.us domain name, and I would bet they had email deliverability issues with people accidentally emailing @zoom.com email addresses.
Great article, thank you
Not surprised at all that they sold Zoom.com.
Rosener, by his own admission, is a trader … so not surprising at all 🙂 …. he sold it in a … zoooooom … lol
Maybe he’ll relax about malibu.com not selling for peanuts now.
The way Andrew keeps churning and burning these MONSTER domains is truly just Phucking Fenomenal!
The radio commercials run constantly in the NYC market and they had a heavy presence at JFK and it is nearly the only .us name I can recall – not surprised at all that Drew sold it to them- I am sure an awesome flip and quite the upgrade for the company!
Mike
I’ve used that service before and it’s really good. Always been a cool use of .us. I hope they continue to use .us and just forward the .com to it, though I guess they might not. There are a few other huge business names that it may surprise do use .us, however. In all cases the .com also forwards to the .us, at least here in the US. Häagen-Dazs is one of them. Calvin Klein is also on .us.
But the really HUGE 8 million ton gorilla that also uses .us is this:
Mastercard.us
And on a related note, see this comment from yesterday:
https://domaininvesting.com/tracking-domain-owner/#comment-81343
Odd, the url doesn’t work properly as a link. Scroll down there to December 13, 2018 at 3:54 pm.
Zoom has raised 145 million at a valuation over one billion USD.
Whatever it paid – 1 million, or 20 million USD — it was a bargain.
Classic example of a company waiting too long to buy the .com.
Before its enormous success and mega funding rounds, it could have bought Zoom.com for high 6 figures,maybe after a seed or Series A Round, topping total funding at 15 million USD