Did Facebook.com Just Acquire Messenger.com? Looks Like They Did

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We have about 1,000 domain names we track on DomainTools.com and we just noticed that the Whois on the domain name Messenger.com has just changed.

The new owner of the domain is the law firm Hogan Lovells LLP of Paris which may not mean too much to you but as we at Thedomains.com follow and write about a lot of UDRP’s we know the law firm represents Facebook in their intellectual property disputes most recently in the case of Facebok.Berlin, and in many other cases including Facebook.info.

Facebook launched Facebook Messenger a while back as a separate app,  if you are using the mobile version of Facebook, so it does make a lot of sense for them to have acquired the domain.

The former owner was listed under privacy with a Tampa address for many years

Back in 2006 the domain was owned by Avaya Inc of Maitland Florida,  under Management of Mark Monitor.

We will keep our eye on this one, although I don’t expect the price to be revealed anytime soon, if Facebook did in fact buy the domain its likely to have been a huge sale (remember Facebook bought FB.com for $8.5 Million).

Congrats to the sellers and buyers whomever they are.

The domain is not currently resolving.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  2. kd says

    I remember when MSN Messanger was big. And then they want and killed it by forcing you to use Skype instead. I have totally moved to GoogleHangouts / Messanger / whatever it is called. It’s a big industry and having the defacto domain for it – good job FaceBook.

  3. bradblackrat says

    Good job facebook indeed! And if it wasn’t for the “other” section in facebook messenger, it would be just as useful as msn/yahoo messenger became once you logged in and got blasted with a billion spam messages!

    By the way… is ICQ even still active? Just a query.

  5. Louise says

    Messenger.com appears to redirect to Avaya as late as late 2008. When did the whois switch to privacy? Was it 2009, or earlier? Maybe Avaya realized it had an asset that could convert to capital, and put it for sale. If MarkMonitor was its Registrar, at least Messenger.com wasn’t lost to Avaya due to negligence!