ABC Announces Freeform; Acquires Freeform.com

In an article published on October 6, ABC announced a name change for ABC Family. According to the article, “ABC Family changes its name to Freeform in January 2016! The network’s new name reflects our ongoing priority to super-serve Becomers, fans on that epic adventure of becoming an adult—from first kiss to first kid!

When I read about the rebranding, I visited Freeform.com to see if ABC was using the exact match .com domain name. Yes, Freeform.com currently forwards to ABCFamily.Go.com, the ABC Family website. A current Whois lookup confirms that Freeform.com is registered to ABC, Inc.

Interestingly, ABC.com Inc. was not listed as the registrant of Freeform.com as recently as October 6, 2015. A historical Whois search on DomainTools shows that the domain name was registered to a Texas company. Prior to this archived record, the domain name was privately registered for quite some time. I presume the privacy was turned off pending the domain name transfer. I would imagine the deal had been worked out prior to the announcement of the rebranding.

Obviously, owning the exact match Freeform.com domain name is important. Assuming the rebranded network Freeform is marketed as much as ABC Family, there would likely be considerable traffic “leakage” to the Freeform.com domain name. If they hadn’t acquired the domain name (or agreed to acquire the domain name) prior to the announcement, the former owner of Freeform.com could have been in a better position to negotiate a deal knowing that a large company likely needed to have the domain name.

I reached out to the former registrant of Freeform.com to see if the company could comment on the sale. If I hear anything, I will update the article. My guess is the sale price is confidential though.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

2 COMMENTS

  1. Wasn’t it ABC who applied and created the .ABC gtld?

    If GTLD’s are the wave of the future, why bother with freeform.com when you can build on freeform.abc?

    • Good point.

      I can’t speak for them obviously, but I assume:

      1) .ABC isn’t available yet
      2) Going to take a while before the majority of the public knows what .ABC or Freeform.ABC means
      3) The cost before launch would have been lower than after launch
      4) Can’t risk having someone use it for political, adult, or other controversial topics
      5) Cost is lower than the risk of letting someone else own.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

2024 Global Domain Report Released Today

0
The annual Global Domain Report, produced jointly by InterNetX and Sedo, has been released and is now available to download at no cost. The...

Grok Knows .com

5
Grok is a generative AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company, xAI. Grok has been promoted within the X / Twitter ecosystem, and X...

Dynadot Now Offering Cryptocurrency Payments

1
Dynadot just announced that it now offers customers the ability to make payments using cryptocurrency. The offering is made via Bitpay, which supports more...

Sedo to Host .AI Auction

0
.AI domain names have become a popular topic of late. Some of the most popular domain industry auctions these days are the monthly expiry...

Scaffolding Company Gets Industry Matching .com for Under $50k

0
Sedo’s Senior Broker Dave Evanson reported the sale of Scaffolding.com yesterday. The domain name sold for $46,666, and it was the largest domain name...