Marchex, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCHX), today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement to sell its remaining domain portfolio of more than 200,000 domains to GoDaddy Inc.(NYSE: GDDY).
Under the agreement, Marchex received cash consideration of $28.1 million from Godaddy, plus additional earn-out payments the terms of which were undisclosed including the maximum additional earn out.
Marchex also announced it sold $6.7 million in direct domain sales since January 2015 so the aggregate proceeds for all for its domain portfolio is $34.8 million, as well as additional earn-out considerations.
I spoke to Pete Christothoulou, Marchex Chief Executive Officer yesterday about the transaction who confirmed that the remaining 100,000 domain names they acquired back in 2004 from Yung Ye/Ultimate Search for $164 Million dollars were included in the transaction.
Marchex announced that since they acquired Yung Te’s portfolio they have sold a total of $80 million in domains and generated more than $290 million in cumulative revenue, excluding domain sales.
It’s important to note that what we announced selling today is NOT directly comparable to what we acquired in 2004, as we have sold certain assets since that time.
Mr. Christothoulou also told me that Marchex would not be releasing details surrounding the $6.7 Million dollars in domain names they sold since January 2015.
According to Pete the domain names Godaddy acquired from Marchex will be for sale through Godaddy/Afternic.
Mr. Christothoulou told me that Marchex is now out of the domain business “Our complete focus is on establishing Marchex as the world’s leading mobile advertising analytics company”, therefore we at TheDomains.com will no longer follow the company.
Its a pretty stunning turn of events for Marchex which announced in 2012 it was going to spin off its domain name division into a separate public company, before abandoning the idea in 2013.
