Marchex - Name Development Ltd

[shorebreak]

Marchex just paid $165M for Name Development Ltd today. Marchex is saying *nothing* about who NDL is or what they do, other than to say NDL does direct navigation and has 17M unique visitors.

Anyone here know?

[andrewgoodman]

I don't have any info in particular (there is a webcast but did not have time to listen), but it looks like this company was a stable of popular domain names. So I'm guessing one of those plays where people direct nav. to some site like rottweiler.com and then get a page of PPC links. I would have to guess that this traffic will be folded into the available traffic flow for Enhance advertisers... Marchex is building a second-tier PPC asset and one would expect more of the same to come.

They say it's a HUGE number of names. And they paid $160 million for the assets, almost all in cash, which really shocks me. I wonder how many of these were popular names due to being good words in general, and how many have been scooped up at expiry from websites who are slow to renew. (With links to those sites existing around the web, there's your ongoing traffic stream.)

[mcanerin]

There is nothing illegal about it at all, but I HATE those type of sites

Many is the times I've typed in a misspelling or clicked on what used to be a good link and ended up on some spammy, useless pseudo-directory....

But apparently it's profitable

Ian

[targettedtraffic]

It really is not about "former links", "old sites", mistypes or spammyness... here we are in late 2004 early 2005 and I am falling off my chair dumbstruck at how few smart people in this industry (and I sincerely mean all those in these forums are smart [read: search savy]) understand the simple concept of type-in traffic and direct navigation. We are talking about people 'typing' internet names ending in .com/.net into their browser's address bar searching for the subject matter described within the contents of the URL domain name.

Those Marchex guys are brilliant IMO. They basically bought some powerful generic names and phrases for a song and now they own that organic traffic forever. They capture internet users like a sail or a kite attracts wind and moves a ship forward. It is pure simple and wholesome as the day is long.

I love the sheer beauty of it!

Nobody in these days of iron fisted corporate governance risks their livlihood and reputation by spending 160 million dollars on a bunch of old oddball sites with links on them .. but generic direct nav domain names married to targeted pages based on keyword weight.. that's gold!

[targettedtraffic]

I have a hunch Marchex isn't exactly shouting this stuff from the rooftops because they are quietly maneuvering to acquire other companies in the same space. Hoping not to attract too much attention.