Last week, I published my first “GoDaddy Special” edition of The Sales Roundup, from the recent list of GoDaddy-facilitated sales that the company disclosed.
In this second part of the GoDaddy Special edition of The Sales Roundup, I look behind the numbers to see why certain domains sold for the prices they did. This week, I’m looking at four sales: Ingles.com, FiveNines.com, Protek.com, and Variable.com.
Ingles.com
The largest disclosed sale from this GoDaddy list is Ingles.com. This name looks to have been acquired from Original Web Ventures Inc, a Canadian company that owns a supreme portfolio including Original.com, Kenya.com, and Pow.com.
It took $400,000 to prise Ingles.com from Original’s possession. Why? Inglés is the Spanish word for “English”. Other Spanish word sales include Vivo.com for $2.1 million and Apuestas.com for $221,100.
But comparable sales are not enough to warrant a $400,000 price tag for Ingles.com on their own. Who was willing to pay $400,000 for Ingles.com?
The buyer was Curiosity Media Inc, a company that runs SpanishDict.com and Fluencia.com. According to the company’s website, these two sites collectively help more than 100 million people per year with Spanish.
As of writing, Ingles.com redirects to SpanishDict.com. However, I don’t believe Curiosity Media acquired Ingles.com to harness its type-in traffic. Alexa.com shows no Alexa ranking for Ingles.com, and SimilarWeb holds no data – signifying that the domain receives no significant traffic.
To get a clearer idea of what Ingles.com will be used for, I reached out to Chris Cummings, the CEO of Curiosity Media to see what insights I could get. He said:
We plan to use the domain as the foundation for building for the premiere English learning application for Spanish speakers. We have over 20 years of experience serving millions of English learners through our website, SpanishDict.com, and we’ll be expanding our reach with the new Ingles.com brand.
FiveNines.com – $100,000
I recognized this domain name from GoDaddy’s list. In 2019, FiveNines.com sold for a reported $34,000 at a DropCatch auction. What’s so valuable about the FiveNines.com domain that means it achieves a five-figure and a six-figure sale in less than a year?
“Five Nines” may represent 99.999%. It’s a standard of reliability that several companies have branded around, from hosting to engineering.
LinkedIn shows 22 companies listed as using “Five Nines” branding. A small amount, but one of those companies paid $100,000 to acquire FiveNines.com.
That company is Five Nines, a Nebraska-based IT outfit founded in 2006 with around 80 staff members listed, and a fairly substantial following for an IT company. This is an upgrade from the domain GoNines.com.
Protek.com – $39,982
GoDaddy seems to be doing great business with UK based operations. Last week, I featured Lendable.com and VanInsurance.com – two six-figure names that were acquired by British companies.
Protek.com is another name purchased by a British company, albeit for a far lower amount. The domain was acquired by Intertek, a quality assurance provider for companies worldwide. Intertek has over 46,000 employees across the globe.
In May 2020, the company announced the launch of Protek, a health and safety solution for work and public spaces. With the COVID-19 pandemic, safe office and public environments are now vital.
Along with Protek, Intertek has a couple of other brands under its umbrella. However, I can’t find any data that shows that they own any exact-match .COM for any other brand aside from Protek.
Intertek certainly has the budget to acquire Protek.com for $39,982 without breaking the bank, and it makes sense from a brand protection perspective.
Variable.com – $36,000
My initial reaction to the Variable.com sale is that at $36,000, the buyer got a fair deal. Variable is a respectable brand name and there are plenty of industries where I think the name would fit perfectly.
Guns isn’t one that I initially think of, though. As of writing, the name has a “coming soon” page counting down to SHOT Show 2021, a shooting trade show in Las Vegas.
There aren’t many clues as to who bought the name, but from research, I think that the name was purchased by Silencer Shop, a firearms accessories outlet.