On this day back in 2015 Michael Berkens announced that he sold the majority of his portfolio to GoDaddy. (171 comments).
At the time Michael could not give numbers but after things settled the numbers came out,
DomainInvesting.com covered the purchase price of $35.5 Million. The credit goes to George Kirikos:
According to a series of tweets from George Kirikos this evening, GoDaddy “*definitely* paid $35.5MM for Mike Berkens domain portfolio.”
Of course Mike started 2015 off great as well, he sold 345.com for $800,000.
Since the sale, GoDaddy has been busy selling names from Michael’s portfolio:
Former name KeepCalm.com was sold and eventually acquired by Andrew Rosener’s Media Options.
TheCommissioner.com was used to promote the Peyton Manning ads for Directv. DeltaDental purchased CoverYourMouth.com, FuelTransport.com sold to the owner of the .ca. MakeTheDeal.com was sold and points to a YouTube Channel, ITellYou.com was sold to a Chinese buyer.
Others include, SilverRain(.)com; DrugDirectory(.)com, Blindfold(.)me, HaveMoreFun(.)com, Nextlinks(.)com. TakeaClass(.)com, LikeaGlove(.)com, LoveRoulette(.)com, RomanticVideos(.)com.
OnlineCars.com which points the .com to Online.Cars.
In all my conversations with Michael he seems very happy that he made his sale when he did. I thought the timing was excellent. A large portfolio is a lot of stress with a lot of pressure to keep selling.
This past week in the news CTX.com expired and closed at $139,001 on GoDaddy auctions, that was a name owned by Michael for many years before moving on to Telepathy and then a couple Chinese registrants.
Four years later, what do you think of the timing of the sale?
Think he did fine with, wouldn’t think it would sell for substantially more or substantially less today.
Depends if he got paid in stock, his deal would be worth $70M today.
One of the classiest, nicest guys in the industry. Well deserved.
What’s total number of domains sold ?
No idea, GoDaddy does not provide any of that info, the examples listed were from names spotted by Michael.
I think the original sale was close to 70,000 names, so about $500 each, but their was a lot of liquid stuff including dirty.com etc… There was a point where the dirty dot com website was one of the top sites online, it’s to bad he didn’t get that sale done before it got sued. I remember seeing the asking price around $200K for that single domain back in the day.
The bulk of the value in that sale beyond the $xxx per name GD paid was in the liquid stuff like numerics, 3 Letter .com’s, etc… He sold his portfolio within maybe 60 – 90 days of the absolute top of the market. Maybe less!
It was an immaculately timed exit and he would get a much lower price today.
He’s a one of the Best in the industry ?
Just not about the money, peace of mine, I can’t imagine waking up every morning, and seeing all those overnight lowball offers come in, and going thru them. He got enough out of the deal he can do whatever he wants, so why hit your head against the $10 offer wall everyday, when he can make up to room service at the 4 seasons.
He retired at the top of his game.
There is no such thing as being retired.
The day when you retired is the day you die.
He is still kicking around with hand reging domsins.
Have to agree with Colin. Michael is one fo the nicest guys in our industry and a super loyal customer! It was a great pleasure working with him as he was always professional and extremely reasonable. Happy to see him sell when he did.
Michael Berkens is the only industry “luminary” I found who completely and expressly saw through the *BS* propaganda argument that was used to railroad and ramrod the removal of ICANN from US oversight as I did, and calmly pointed out how it was plainly that. And now we have the dismantling and debacle of the railroading of legacy TLD price cap removal and the brazen “follow the money” money grab on .org, which could never have flown under the radar or been “politically feasible” either under Obama or the current administration had it not been for that. I’m not even sure Michael himself even supports the price caps on legacy TLDs, since one can discern in part that he apparently tends to lean a certain way in his personal ideologies, though maybe he does. Regardless, I have long held an impression of confidence in his ability and disposition to allow truth to take precedence over ideology in the personal struggle we all face in life between good and evil, darkness and light – and even without regard to name, face or source as well.