The domain market continues to show a trend towards consolidation. Donuts recently acquired Afilias' domain assets, and here is a new major deal: Go Daddy announced the purchase of 30 gTLDs for a total of $120 million. These include domains managed by MMX, as well as .CLUB and .DESIGN. Go Daddy is best known as the world's largest domain registrar, but it debuted as a registry last year, having acquired domains previously operated by Neustar.
MMX's portfolio includes 28 domains, the largest of which are .VIP (about 900,000 registrations) and .WORK (about 650,000). Also, the domains of the MMX subsidiary, ICM Registry, are transferred under the control of Go Daddy. It manages four adult domains: .XXX, .PORN, .ADULT, and .SEX. Domain Incite, reporting this news, notes that such a step is quite unexpected: recently, Go Daddy has been actively cultivating the image of a family-friendly company.
Go Daddy is also acquiring .CLUB and .DESIGN. The first one is the most successful of these acquisitions, with the number of registrations exceeding 1 million. The second one cannot boast of such numbers, with about 120,000 names registered. But more importantly, both domain zones demonstrate stable organic growth, while doing without simple and obvious tricks like large discounts. In addition, Go Daddy will also become the technical operator of the .RUGBY, .BASKETBALL and .ALLY domain zones. This brings the total number of generic top-level domains that Go Daddy controls in one form or another to more than 240.
