Donuts Inc., publicly announced its interest in acquiring Rightside Group, Ltd.’s (NAME) entire registry of generic top-level domains (gTLDs, also known as domain extensions) and related assets for $70 million in an all-cash deal.
According to a press release out today, Donuts said “this move is in keeping with Donuts’ stated strategy of expanding its selection of not-com domain extensions, such as .movie, .LTD, .agency, .email, .school, .group, and many more, each providing a more descriptive and creative means for big brands, entrepreneurs, and dreamers alike to brand their businesses, products and services. Donuts already leads the industry, having secured 196 domain extensions, and is best positioned to market these assets by driving industry consolidation.”
In my opinion it would seem like its a deal Rightside would decline, since it recently rejected a $5 Million cash just a short time ago for just 4 of Rightside’s new gTLD extensions from Daniel Negari the CEO of the .XYZ registry.
In the $5 Million dollar offer, the new gTLD strings had a total of less than 15,000 registrations.
Here were the four and the number of registrations at the time:
.Army 1,131
.Vet 5,180
.Dentist 2,792
.Dance 4,878
Rightside currently has 40 new gTLD’s (including .games which is in the cue to launch).
According to ntldstats.com Rightside 40 new gTLD’s have 543,820 domain name registrations, so the $5 million dollar rejected offer was new gTLD’s with just over 15,000 registrations or $333 a registration, while the $70 Million dollar offer amounts to about $133 a domain registration.
Rightside closed yesterday at $9.06 down $.16 and has a market cap of over $173 Million.
As a gTLD investor, I’d love to see this happen. Rightside is a crappy company.
smells of publicity stunt
Interesting comment, I find it crazy to think that you could drop that kind of cash on the other extensions already and get a decent return on the investment. sure I see all the add on services after the domain registration but to that extent? Maybe in 7-10 years or so?
These two are so intertwined already, very very fishy, sec kinda stuff
Taryn, don’t sell !!!
(back of napkin analysis)
If RS spent $20 mil (16 plus game??) for the gtlds, plus spent $ 5 mil (??) on marketing, I wonder how long it will take RS to make $ 45 mil in profit? ( 70 – 16 – 5)
Note also that Donuts TLDs are operated by the Rightside back-end, so all TLDs would keep generating profits for them.
gTLDs can and will change BERO/RSP in the future. Look at MMX moving theirs to Nominet for one example.