BuyDomains becomes NameMedia
According to an article in the Boston Globe (“Internet stealth company steps out“) YesDirect (which includes BuyDomains) is becoming NameMedia. Today (7:15am ET), www.namemedia.com still points to BuyDomains.com, however the YesDirect Site already shows a NameMedia website. Now at 10:15am ET NameMedia.com points to the NameMedia website as well.
The company, called NameMedia, is being led by Kelly P. Conlin , 46, a veteran media executive who previously had been chief executive of International Data Corp. in Boston and Primemedia Inc. in New York. NameMedia has already hired 75 people in its office near Route 128 to buy, sell, and develop businesses around Internet domain names.
NameMedia, which already is profitable, says it owns more Internet domain names than any other party and draws more than 25 million consumers monthly to its vast collection of websites. It makes money when computer users type the name of one of its sites, such as photography.com, bookstore.com, or jobfinder.com, into the Internet address bar and then click on advertising links.
The article goes on to explain that NameMedia will be following the current industry trend and is planning to develop some of their most valuable online properties.
On top of the 650,000 domains in their own portfolio the company also says to have exclusive rights to sell or monetize 350,000 additional names. I would imagine that those numbers includes the GoldKey and ActiveAudience domain parking services.
I am sure we will be hearing more about them.
[Update]
I needed to find out more about the 350,000 additional names, since I wanted to know if there’s any partnership besides the domains parked with GoldKey and ActiveAudience. Goldkey has a little over 66,500 domains pointing to their DNS in the registery according to the zonefiles [webhosting.info]. Active Audience has about 5,600 names pointing to their dns [webhosting.info]. So this adds up to 72,100 domains. Even if you would add some domains that are parked via domain forwarding, I would doubt that the total amount of domain names from those parking services is higher than 100,000. So it has to be assumed that NameMedia includes a partnership with one or more portfolio(s) with a another 250,000 domain names.
There are 700,000 names in the zonefiles pointing to the BuyDomains namesservers [webhosting.info].
And here comes the Press Release.
Russ was so kind to help me out with some additional ZoneFile data. I had indeed missed the domain names pointing to their current domain name registrar provider. So there are about 145,000 additional domains on their nameservers, however some of them are actually hosted sites. Russ also confirmed that GoldKey and ActiveAudience appear to allow framed forwarding.
[...] Didn’t I say earlier today that we would be hearing more about NameMedia/BuyDomains? Well, it appears that they have partnered with DomainCapital in order to provide Domainers with financing for domain purchases. [...]