Oversee.net’s recent purchase of a company that sells premium Web addresses worth millions of dollars is evidence of boom times in the world of virtual real estate.
The acquired company, Florida-based Moniker, made headlines last year for auctioning the domain name Seniors.com for $1.8 million. Shortly after, it sold Computer.com for $2.2 million.
It is the latest in a string of major purchases for downtown L.A.-based Oversee.
“It comes down to a dot-com real estate land grab,” said analyst Eric Martinuzzi of Craig-Hallum Capital Group. “Smart people have been at this for years. But owning these domain names is only as good as the traffic they generate. And that’s tied to relevant content.”
Oversee.net has built a $200 million business around generating traffic around relevant content. It takes “parked” Web sites that hold neither value nor content for users and powers them with software that automatically loads the sites with links to advertisements.
So when someone types in “SoapOperas.com” directly into the browser address bar, the site, which sits on Oversee’s software, shows links about soap operas, and the links get updated in real-time based upon what keywords are searched on the site and what links get most clicks.
This is called direct navigation and Oversee.net estimates advertisers make about $1 billion this way.
Oversee.net equips about 2.5 million domain names with this technology, in addition to the 700,000 domain names it owns. The Moniker acquisition will add to that number.
Jeff Kupietzky, the company’s executive vice president, declined to say how much the deal was worth, but said the acquisition adds 30 employees to the 210-person company.
Moniker adds high-priced premium domain names to Oversee.net’s inventory and bolsters Oversee.net’s long-term plan of becoming a “one-stop” shop for domain name owners, so that they can buy, monetize or sell domain names through the company, Kupietzky said.
Last year, Oversee.net acquired SnapNames, the operator of the largest source of deleted or expired domain names. The purchase made about 20,000 such names available to its customers.
