Did Snap pay $5million for Snap.com ?

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Snapchat now know as Snap Inc is going public. George Kirikos tweeted out a few minutes ago the following:

I went to page F-21 and you can see the following:

There is a $5 million number for domain names, can’t imagine any other domain purchases by the company that would account for this number. They did acquire Spectacles.com for their camera product. That looks to have been in August of 2016.

About Raymond Hackney

Raymond is a writer, domain trader and consultant based in Pennsylvania. Raymond is the founder of 3Character.com and TLDInvestors.com.

Comments

  5. George Kirikos says

    Just to add more analysis that couldn’t fit into 140 characters…..

    According to the WHOIS history at DomainTools, Snap.com changed from Idealab in mid-November of 2014 (into DomainsByProxy and then later MarkMonitor’s DNStination.

    If you look at the tables on page F-21 (remember they’re amortizing domains over 5 years, see page F-17), this lines up almost perfectly with a single $5 million deal in November/December 2014. i.e. at the
    end of December 2015, the remaining useful life would have dropped from 5 to around 3.8 (which it did) and the accumulated amortization similarly reflects approximately 1.2 years of amortization starting from $5 million on that specific transaction date (as opposed to multiple domain names over different dates).

    Although, for the year ending December 2016 compared to December 2015, it should have gone down from 3.8 to 2.8 (it shows 3.0 instead), but the accumulated depreciation of $2,157,000 still lines up well with what it should be if it was a single domain name of $5 million when Snap.com went into WHOIS privacy. That slight discrepancy of 2.8 vs 3.0 might just be sloppiness (given the $5 million “gross” amount didn’t change from year to year, so there were no other transactions in play).

    But, we still don’t know if there’s an equity component, which Idealab loves to do (they did that for Top10.com, for example), I think some further confirmation from either Snap or Idealab would help us to know for sure (so it can be charted on DNJournal, etc.).

  7. Richard says

    I just heard that the price for ONE spot at this years Super Bowl is $5M… Either we are in an ad price bubble or domains are still way too cheap. Snap essentially got the domain snap.com for the price of a single tv spot. Ridiculous.

  8. steve says

    Snapchat has rebranded to Snap just as Tesla Motors rebranded to Tesla & Apple Computer to Apple.

    $5 million is beer money to the Company.

    Documents reveal it paid $157.5 million to one of the founders, Reggie Brown, who left after 6 months, as the company was floundering in the early days, to pursue more “practical business” opportunities in his hometown in North Carolina.

  9. steve says

    The company/app was originally called Peekaboo at peekaboo,.com
    They changed the name to Snapchat.com as people thought the app was adult or porn
    It still was getting zero traction.
    One founder left.
    The remaining two founders were about to pull the plug, then somebody suggested letting some students at a high in Los Angles and another in Santa Barbara try it out as an alternative to Instagram and Facebook —-

    It went viral, and 2 remaining founders, nearly out the door, will be among the 50 wealthiest persons in the world at the end of 2017.

    Oh, and Evan Spiegel, founder, finally got a girlfriend, Miranda Kerr, former Victoria Secret Model, whom he is engaged to marry.

    Let us hope the Snap founders make major contributions to those two high schools —

  12. Michael says

    So that makes my 23 year old domain (TAXI.com) worth how much? I agree with the logic behind the cost of a Superbowl being $5 mil, BTW. The lifetime value of the right domain far exceeds the sales generated by one TV spot.