As reported on Sahar's blog:
http://www.conceptualist.com/?p=537
It appears Bob Guccione Jr. has sold Discover Media's website address:
Quote: "While most print companies are desperately trying to become multi-platform companies, Discover Media sold off its discover.com Web address to Discover Card for about $5 million."
Not buying an obvious generic name is one thing ...but selling your existing address to raise cash is poison ... Particularly so if you're in the "publishing" business.
Now his company gets to rebrand, recreate search engine links and reputation .. old archived stories would have to be republished and re-indexed. Quite a potential mess depending on how active the discover.com domain was.
This is the equivalent of having the gold in the palm of your had and giving it away because you didn't understand what you had. Completely foolish.
When did this sale take place? Looking at WHOIS history at Domain Tools, it shows the domain name changed hands back in May, 2007. Was it just announced recently?
mp/m
Posted by: Mike Maddaloni | October 21, 2007 at 02:36 PM
Reminds me of when the Mail.com sold off all those generic domains for a few million bucks. That was a much bigger gaffe than this -- because if anyone knew the value of domain names, it was (supposed) to be the folks at Mail.com.
Posted by: autonic | October 21, 2007 at 04:56 PM
Weren't those mail.com names sold off to one of the directors cheap?
If I'd been a stockholder, I'd be pretty peeved!
***FS*** I think they were Drew. Didn't seem arms length. Hard to say for sure tho. Could have been a settlement or something unrelated involved that offset the price.
Posted by: Drewbert | October 21, 2007 at 09:10 PM
A side not on this, Jr's father Bob Guccione Sr is the founder of Penthouse Magazine.
Posted by: VS | October 22, 2007 at 01:09 AM
Assuming the company was worth only $20million then selling off the web address for $5million doesn't sounds like an obviously bad idea to me. Would be interesting to know what kind of revenue their site was bringing in for them. Unless the company was really reliant on that one address (ie probably a lot of purely internet based companies) I don't think many would turn down 25% of their net worth for the sake of changing their url.
***FS*** I wonder how much of their 20mm in revenue was predicated-on/compromised-by that change Snoop. Imagine if CNN had sold CNN.com as it was getting started.. lost momentum .. confusion due to change.. opportunity cost. Not as if Discover media is a pipe company changing their name from utube.com
Posted by: Snoopy | October 22, 2007 at 07:43 AM
Owner of mail.com et al never sold their domains. Only provided access to their mx records (so people could use their email account *@domain.com) while keeping profit of the http traffic.
Posted by: Yvo | October 22, 2007 at 07:59 AM
My previous comment was a bit off. But from my understanding mail.com never owned the domains, only the 'mail' part of the domain... i could be wrong ;)
Posted by: Yvo | October 22, 2007 at 08:07 AM
Yvo,
You are wrong about Mail.com. They did own all those domain names. Asia.com, India.com, Lawyer.com, Doctor.com, Email.com, and hundreds more incredible generics, all of which they sold to their former CEO for practically nothing.
Posted by: autonic | October 22, 2007 at 11:47 AM