Three years ago today, GoDaddy’s NameFind purchased the portfolio of Michael Berkens’ Most Wanted Domains.
Michael made one of the biggest splashes of 2015 by announcing that he sold the majority of his portfolio to GoDaddy, close to 70,000 domain names. Adult names and new gtlds were not included in the sale, so Michael still owns over 10,000 domain names.
DomainInvesting.com covered the purchase price of $35.5 Million. The credit goes to George Kirikos:
According to a series of tweets from George Kirikos this evening, GoDaddy “*definitely* paid $35.5MM for Mike Berkens domain portfolio.”
A lot of things have transpired since Mike’s sale, I think he timed it perfectly. Mike owned a 105 three letter .coms at the time of the sale as one of his most liquid categories.
What do you think of the timing of the sale?
Recons says
LLLs still made a small fraction of the overall value, so change there doesn’t affect anything much.
Let’s say, he got paid wholesale for those names around $3MM and now they would be worth wholesale around $1.5MM, that is just 5% difference in the overall price paid.
Snoopy says
Would need need to look at the entire portfolio, great timing for lll.com, llll.com, numeric domains. In fact pretty good timing for anything except singular one word .com domains!
Pity he couldn’t have offloaded the ntlds to them, but Godaddy aren’t silly!
Vito says
Agree 100% w/Snoopy here except for maybe that last sentence though,
MB is one of the smartest domainers ever, enough to make even whatever nTLD’s he has, make him rich all over again.
Would be a great follow up story from him one day.
Yeah, so that $35 million sale was really great timing.
anna says
mike is a lucky guy
Mike says
I’m sure Mike would not have sold if he was 30 years, he is a guy who loves domains, and even better so a negotiation.
But at 60, it’s hard to deal with low ballers day in and day out on a 70k portfolio.