New BIG domain sale!!

buddy · Jul 10, 2002

"The sale of the sports.com website domain name and its related on-line betting business has achieved a "substantial seven figure sum", according to the administrators"

Here is the article. You may need to sign up in order to read it.
http://www.sportbusiness.com/news/index?news_item_id=147531&region=global

Jul 10, 2002

In a separate deal reported yesterday on sportbusiness.com, SCG Enterprises Ltd, the betting arm of Sports.com has been sold to ukbetting plc in a deal priced at around ÃÂ£670,00($1.025m/EUR1.042m), saving 11 jobs.

Administrator Bruce Mackay said, "Commercial sensitivity prevents me from disclosing the exact sum received for the termination of the license of the sports.com domain. However I can confirm that in total we have comfortably exceeded our target of a seven-figure sum for the main domain and the betting business. This is a fantastic result for creditors who often expect to receive little or nothing from the collapse of failed dot.coms."

Separate negotiations for the content provision side of the business are still on going but a sale now looks unlikely. Mackay commented, "Sadly, this is symptomatic of the dot.com industry. Potential buyers are primarily interested in the name and customer base rather than the content of the site and the contracts that go around it. Unless your content is unique it is very difficult to persuade the buyer to purchase the whole package."

Interesting, but if they got over $1m for the business itself, they could have all but given the domain away and still have "comfortably exceeded our target of a seven-figure sum".

Will be interesting to see if the final domain price is ever made public.

Jul 10, 2002

There are more details in this article:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/dotcoms/story/0,7521,752297,00.html

But the administrators, Baker Tilly, have been able to raise little more than ÃÂ£1m through the sell-off of its assets.

Baker Tilley said today it had raised over ÃÂ£500,000 by selling the rights to the Sports.com domain name back to its original owner.

The company has already raised ÃÂ£670,000 through the sale of its betting arm to the acquisitive online bookie, UKBetting.

(ÃÂ£1 = $1.54 currently accordint to xe.net)