So after 4 hours of intrigue and guesses on Twitter, George Kirikos reveals that he discovered the 7 figure sale of Goto.com. GotoMeeting.com was the buyer.
From Sec Filings:
During the three months ended March 31, 2018, the Company entered into an agreement to acquire a domain name for $2.5 million, which was paid in April 2018. The Company also capitalized $6.0 million and $7.1 million during the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2018, respectively, of costs related to internally developed software to be sold as a service incurred during the application development stage and is amortizing these costs over the expected lives of the related services.
GoToMeeting is a web-hosted service created and marketed by LogMeIn.
Another person actually tweeted the right guess as George did not reach his goal of 50 retweets, we were stuck in the twenties.
https://t.co/w5PgQIK3Xi for $2.5M ?
— Bill Patterson (@billp3) April 28, 2018
Using the reverse WHOIS and WHOIS history at DomainTools, it became clear that GoTo.com was the relevant domain name (which wasn’t stated in the SEC filing, page 17).
That was once an IdeaLab spinoff, a pioneer in PPC advertising, it later became Overture.com (which so many of us remember from “the good old days”). Now it has found a new home with LogMeIn.
As is often the case, these high transaction prices are from a domain name upgrade (in this case, upgrading “GoToMeeting.com” to “GoTo.com”).
Makes perfect sense to upgrade. Thanks for sharing George and Raymond.
was go2.com included? it was owned by the same company and now is with CSC.
So yeah, they bought go2.com as well. Must of been a package deal.
Nice catch, cmac. Despite describing it in the singular (“a domain name”) in the SEC filing, it does appear it was a package. I would place most of the value on GoTo.com, but DNJournal usually doesn’t put package deals on their charts, even when a single domain is the primary acquisition (that’s why FB.com for $8.5 million isn’t charted, for example).
George, what else came with FB.com ?
Adam: at least 1 other domain name, see:
http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/01/11/farm-bureau-finds-wealthy-friend-in-facebook/
“At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling ***a couple of domain names*** but is barred from identifying the buyer. ” (emphasis added)
That’s why it doesn’t get charted by DNJournal (although, clearly the other one must have a minor domain).
Goto.com – they story made me relive my start. My first site personal was a meta ppc search and they were one of my feed suppliers. My 1st employer made an offer to buy them in 2001 when they were located in Utah.