DomainTools Blog

Watch out world, Name Media is going public. They will raise $172.5 million in an initial public offering of common stock.

Since they started everything off with the acquisition of the BuyDomains.com in February 2005, Name Media has completed eight acquisitions of businesses and technologies and one acquisition of a large, premium domain name portfolio (I reveal the domains below) . Aggregate cost for these acquisitions was approximately $62.5 million. Here are some of the acquisitions I found documented in the S-1 filing with the Government.

Name Media quoted the first 3 quarters of 2007 in their S-1. So I have estimated some numbers above based on the fact they have one more quarter to go.

Premium Domain Name Portfolio was acquired in December 2006, it was approximately 40 domain names from an unrelated third-party for cash consideration of approximately $13.5 million. The acquisition was funded with the proceeds of our debt financing. Approximately half of these names are being held for development as premium enthusiast websites. The remainder are included in registration rights available for sale. The average cost per domain came out to be $337,500.I wonder what these domains are…. I think I have to go look at the DNS transactions for that time period and scan for generics. Here is what I believe the 40 domains are:

BuyDomains.com (RareNames LLC) was acquired on February 22, 2005 for $72,500,000 in cash and 750,000 shares of Series Z Stock. Total Value is about $80,600,000.

GoldKey.com, LLC was acquired on March 16, 2006, for $2,387,000. Terms of the acquisition also provide for a future purchase payment, not to exceed $500,000 contingent upon achieving certain financial milestones.

Morefocus Group, Inc. was acquired on July 28, 2006, for $1,084,000.

Dave’s Garden was acquired on January 11, 2007 for $3,500,000.

Photo.net was acquired on April 11, 2007 for $6,000,000.

Afternic, Inc. was acquired on November 3, 2006, for $3,726,000. Terms of the acquisition also provide for future purchase payments, not to exceed $1,550,000 contingent upon achieving certain financial milestones.

SmartName, LLC was acquired on September 2006, for approximately $16.5 million. In 2004, the company received $4,109,367 in revenue from Yahoo. It collectively had a 71% profit share with parkers and it kept $1,172,017. In 2005, the revenue share decreased to parkers, 67%, but the revenue collected from Yahoo was $10,557,298, so it kept $3,471,229. By taking the first 6 months of revenue we can extrapolate that Smartname made $22,132,724 in 2006 and revenue share of 71% with parkers so they made a total of $6,286,992.

Visionary Networks, Inc was acquired on January 2007, which provides an online community in astrology and other related subjects. The purchase price of the acquisition was approximately $14.1 million. Terms of the acquisition also provide for future purchase payments, not to exceed $7.5 million, contingent upon achieving certain financial milestones for the years ended December 31, 2007 and 2008.

Overall it looks like a good portfolio of assets and I am looking to get more information! A lot of this information was confidential and locked away. Now that they are going public they are releasing the nuggets and everyone in our industry is reading the S-1 carefully. Name Media has come a long way since it bought Mike Mann’s company. It seems they are forced to go public because they need to repay the debt they have accumulated by September of next year.