According to Tweets from George Kirikos and Daniel Negari it appears that Coupons.com made a cool $4.8 Million dollars for withdrawing its application for the new gTLD .Coupons
George found an SEC filing that showed Coupons.com received $4.8 million dollars from the sale of a domain name.
Coupons.com withdrew its application to operate the new gTLD .Coupons which left Donuts, the only applicant for .Coupons the winner of what appears to have been a private auction or some other method to privately settle contention.
The stated fee of Applicant Auction to conduct private new gTLD auctions was as high as 4% meaning that it is likely that Donuts paid $5 Million for .Coupons and Coupons.com netted $4.8 Million after commission.
Of course it only cost Coupons.com $185,000 to file it’s application for .Coupons making this the best coupon the company ever redeemed.
We own the single word “Coupons” in an extension~maybe it is worth something to the right party. Interesting post.
Good for Donuts .coupons is a great domain extension for retail marketing. Donuts appears to be the only real winner of new gtlds.
But better for .com. Another billion dollar company abandoning key new gtld (for less than $5M) to solely focus building their business upon their .com
You are assuming that part of the agreement didn’t include premium domains under the .coupons extension (which is always a possibility)
It’s a billion dollar company
Either you go strong or you dont go at all
Absolutely no sense in abandoning the .coupons gtld only to make a deal for some “premium” ones
It’s 100% about sphere of influence and if coupons.com is abandoning .coupons for a mere $5M they certainly don’t want to help extend the sphere of influence of .coupons by marketing an extension they have no control over
Unless they are really, really dumb – which I doubt
Who would have thought that the real money in gTLD´s is made in settlements with other applicants 🙂
Should have applied for various strings myself… 4.8 million, that is serious money just for walking away. Nice
Actually free money from settlements always looked the most likely outcome. I expected to pick up $5-10m by applying for a few. But there was just enough uncertainty over what might happen to deter given that it wouldn’t have been a pleasant game to play.
The assumption that Donuts is the biggest winner appears somewhat absurd.
To date they have invested far more were others fears to tread with no proven revenue stream.
As it stands, Donuts is in pole position for the Biggest Loser.
If they get that as a cash injection, would seem like a perfect business opportunity to simply sell subdomains.coupons.com!
I can’t imagine that the revenue from the gtld sales on this one will surpass the opportunity coupons now has for quite some time.
You can’t be running a domain like like coupon.com and not be smart – smartest people on earth look for coupons.
Coupons.com understands this very well-the stock market is ripping and all new extensions will be hit exceptionally hard in a downturn-thus they took the money. As J. Paul Getty once said “I got rich selling too early”