January 15, 2008

Oversee.net Gets a $150 Million Injection of Private Equity

Erick Schonfeld

8 comments »

Domain-name holding company Oversee.net is getting a $150 million cash infusion from private equity firm Oak Hlll Capital Partners. Oversee has been on a buying spree lately, snapping up domain auctioneer SnapNames for $35 million last October and domain registrar Moniker for $65 million a couple weeks ago.

It also owns more than two million domain names, and no doubt will keep buying more. Overesee operates domain marketing services, including DomainSponsor, Revenue.net, and Low.com (mortgage lead generation). Buying domain portfolios and domain-related marketing businesses is becoming pretty capital intensive. As long as there is money to be made in online advertising, domainers like Oversee.net will continue to do well. But if a recession arrives and online advertising takes a hit, so will the domain-name sector.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 7:45 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Domain Name Wire

January 16th, 2008 at 7:13 am

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Martin Edic

January 15th, 2008 at 10:32 am

Disagree on the recession point. In a recession marketing dollars will move into measurable, transactional media buys, i.e. online advertising. The efficiency of ROI is the thing. Traditional media gets killed, online suffers from a lack of inventory. In this scenario domain owners who develop (as opposed to simply holding or parking) will profit. Those who are in for quick trading of domains will get hurt.
The question is what does Oversee do with the capital? I suspect development of a media empire is an option.
Next question- why don’t they own (or use) oversee.com? Spend the bucks guys and get the real TLD.
Andy Schweig

January 15th, 2008 at 10:55 am

completely agreed with #1, in a recession, direct response marketers like Oversee.net should thrive, while companies that rely heavily on brand advertising (like Yahoo) will suffer.
Peter

January 15th, 2008 at 11:54 am

I was asked this question about 6 months ago when the credit crunch was first starting to make big waves. I totally agree with the statement. When marketers start to see reduced budgets while having increased pressure for results, that superbowl ad is going to look less and less attractive next to an online campaign, especially when looking at direct navigation traffic that tends to convert multiples better than even traditional search.

As well, the domain development evolution is what sparked our business model. Syndicating our user-generated content provides large swaths of product related domain properties a way to create memorable brands while increasing return visits and overall revenue. IMO, the partial or complete development of even a small portion of their domains will see Oversee progress into an online media empire in no time.
Technicle

January 15th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

>why don’t they own (or use) oversee.com? Spend the bucks guys and get the real TLD.

While topix.net spent $1M to get topix.com, there’s really no need to, for real companies having real business models.

Eg., daum.net (korea biggie), gmx.net (germany biggie) or boingboing.net, or box.net, eg., are on .net’s. Craigslist and Slashdot and PaidContent etc highly successful with .org’s. Dotcom, while standard, is not a must.
will

January 15th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

you guys are forgetting that recession will drive down consumer demand which means search volumn for services/prodcucts will drop (mortgage search terms have dropped)

so even if marketers want to spend more money, they will not be able to. . . matter of supply and demand
Technicle

January 15th, 2008 at 12:18 pm

Recession will leave more people to stay online; when ads revenue dry up, revert to fee-based models. Economy comes and goes in cycles. Internet economy and/or biz models not much different.
Andrew

January 16th, 2008 at 7:14 am

Re Oversee.net not owning Oversee.com: It is a bit ironic, but in this case it’s not a big deal. Oversee.net is really just the holding company; buyers visit the holdings including DomainSponsor (and now Moniker).