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Sedo buys GreatDomains.com
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June 19th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
Tim Schumacher of Sedo announced this morning that they have bought the old GreatDomains.com
website. Tim explained that the sale was a great victory for Sedo because Sedo had once competed with GreatDomains in the aftermarket and it feels good to own the former competitor. This marks an end to Verisign competing in the Secondary Market. There is still rumors from Verisign that if they come back, it will be in the form of a registry service.
The sale was confirmed to be over $2 Million and below the 2000 sale of the company for $50,000,000. Verisign bought the company in the dotcom bubble and was left holding the bag when the market crashed. We think the sale was around $2,200,000 and it included the customer lists and the sales history from all the years that GreatDomains.com existed. GreatDomains has been on a downward spiral since it was bought in 2000. The Traffic is estimated to be around 3,732 US Visitors a month by Quantcast. We can confirm the traffic is over 10,000 visitors a month but in terms of traffic it has seen better days. Sedo has a lot of future plans for their old new brand. They will be holding a monthly auction like Moniker’s auctions except it will be completely online. The auctions will last for 7 days and always start at the same time every month. This represents a significant threat to Moniker. If the monthly auctions take off for generic domains, they could challenge the need for live auctions at conferences. Sedo promises to do out reach with press releases if good domains are scheduled for the auction that month.
I think Sedo over paid for this purchase, but perhaps the customer records and sales data was worth it. The domain has a brand that people remember, a Google PR6, and 7,159 backlinks according to Yahoo. Look for the official PR news release this week.
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8 Comments »
June 19th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Check the number of domains still using ns1.greatdomains.com
and ns2.greatdomains.com
— they could be redirected to new Sedo parking.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
I believe GreatDomains is a more powerfull domain than sedo.
Is sedo a last name?
Who said don’t buy the keyword; buy the domain?
Play
June 29th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I don’t know where to post this, but since this is about Sedo, I just want to make it public that Sedo has offered my domain ifinddomains.com
for sale (for $100.00) WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! I did NOT agree to this price, nor will I honor this price. The sale also appears on Afternic.
When I added this domain to my Sedo account, it was noted above my list of domains that they needed to verify the domain. The domain was NOT included on my optimizer list. I also had some other names that needed to be verified with a note, “Not for Sale.” They WERE on my optimizer list, and I could work on those pages, such as changing templates, etc. However, I am unable to access ifinddomains.com
at all through my Sedo account.
I do retain access through Yahoo!
I immediately unparked my domain from their site, and the name is back on a Yahoo! construction page. I just don’t want to be legally obligated to sell my domain name for dirt cheap.
Makes me wonder what is going on at Sedo and whether I should cancel my account.
Sincerely, Jennifer
June 30th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Thank you for posting my message. And thank you, DomainTools, for taking the “for sale” off my Whois listing. Afternic has emailed me as well stating they would take my domain off their sale list.
I am still waiting to hear from Sedo.
Best wishes, Jennifer