Uni Naming & Registry Services (UNR.com) concluded the public sale of 23 Top Level Domains. Following its April 28-30 auction event, the company has announced gross receipts of more than $40 million USD for its 20+ TLDs.
More than 250 businesses and individuals signed up to potentially join this auction, and ultimately 17 bidders deposited deposits to participate. Neither UNR nor its affiliates bid in the auctions.
Although the identities of the new owners remain confidential at this time, between 10 and 20 bidders came away as winners, including six who will be operating TLDs for the first time. The broad range of winners include established registries, investment firms, blockchain companies, and high net-worth individuals.
The 23 New gTLD extensions sold were .audio, .blackfriday, .christmas, .click, .country, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .llp, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy, .tattoo.
So the average sales price for each extension was less than $2 million. The initial investment in 2012 was about $60 million.
In speaking about the outcome of this event, Frank Schilling, Founder of UNR remarked; “All UNR shareholders should be exceptionally pleased with the final outcome of this first-of-its-kind event. We are deeply satisfied to have seen so much new interest and blood enter the arena. The winners today were not just those who walked away with new extensions, but all participants in the naming arena – including the registrants and registrars vending these valuable domains to the public. UNR is especially proud to have been bold enough to help make this type of event a possibility for the entrepreneurs and dreamers of tomorrow. We are excited to introduce so many new operators to the domain industry and help them further develop their TLDs with our class-leading technology and software.”
UNR claims that the sale happened because the company wants to focus on its registry services division and IP rights protection technology.
So despite what the press release is saying Frank Schilling sold his 23 New gTLDs and is getting out of domain names completely after selling Uniregistry and his domain name portfolio to GoDaddy last year.
