Top domain news: Donuts acquired and AWS.com sells

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Big news in the domain business

The big news last month for the domain industry was Abry Partners' acquisition of Donuts.

Donuts operates about 240 top level domains, all but one of which were part of the new top level domain name program.

Although Donuts is rather profitable, the exit makes sense. Donuts has been around for eight years so some of the early investors were ready to cash out. Heck, one of their early investors--Austin Ventures--has shut down shop since then.

So how'd the deal come together? I'm not sure, but it's probably not a coincidence that former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé is a partner at Abry Partners.

On another note, are you heading to Barcelona this month for the ICANN meeting? If you'd like to meet up, please reply to this email and we can schedule some time.

Let's take a look at the top stories on DNW last month, as ranked by pageviews:

1. Amazon buys AWS.com domain name - Amazon acquired the AWS.com domain name from a weather technology company that was no longer using it.

2. How Dropbox got the Dropbox.com domain name - The guy who sold the domain to Dropbox chose $300,000 cash instead of equity. The equity would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

3. How much would .Com domains cost if .com went out to bid? - Recent data show that competitors would run .com for a lot less than what Verisign charges.

4. Those domains you're sitting on? They will probably never sell. - Many of the domains investors buy will not sell in their lifetime.

5. Domain name company Donuts Inc. acquired by private equity firm Abry Partners - A private equity firm at which former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé is a partner acquired top level domain name company Donuts.

And here are the DNW podcasts from September

#203 - Why Cyril Fremont just bought an entire TLD

#202 - The Registry/Registrar Sales Channel with Jay Daley

#201 - Talking UDRP with Gerald Levine

#200 - Selling social media handles

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Thanks for reading,
Andrew