Frank Schilling, Uniregistry founder.
Uniregistry founder, Frank Schilling, announced the sale of key Uniregistry assets to GoDaddy last week.
The transaction, that has been estimated at more than $500 million dollars, includes the sale of more than 350,000 domain names from Frank Schilling’s personal portfolio.
Frank has been an active bidder at NameJet, although in recent years the “Taryn” alias is being operated by a bot.
The acquisition of Frank Schilling’s domain portfolio brings the total number of GoDaddy-owned domains to about 1,000,000 under corporate management.
At some point, Frank Schilling told us that it’d take three lifetimes to sell his 350,000 domains – and that’s with an active team of Uniregistry brokers.
How long would it take to sell 1 million domains?
The obvious answer – 9 lifetimes – would be a quick guess. But is this guess accurate?
There are some sales parameters that differ, however.
For example, GoDaddy’s domain brokerage team will be enhanced by the technology that Uniregistry is bringing to GoDaddy. The Uniregistry Market platform is decades ahead of whatever in-house system GoDaddy is using, and Afternic needs to be brought out of the 2000s.
Another point of difference between the two marketplaces is that Frank Schilling’s pricing model will no longer apply.
Frank’s domain pricing was aimed at end-users primarily, squeezing top dollar out of every sale. To achieve this level of pricing, domain brokers took time to nurse every inquiry; the sales-driven GoDaddy team is known for keeping sellers “motivated” by asking them to lower their asking prices.
Given these new parameters, we anticipate Frank Schilling’s former domain portfolio to sell faster than before, both to enterprising domain investors and end-users that will most likely be contacted again with a lower selling price. The new technology introduced by Uniregistry, will help GoDaddy manage and sell its domain portfolio faster as well.
