Bloomberg: MDLive.com Sold for $200k

Per a thread on DNForum and originally reported in Bloomberg last week, the domain name MDLive.com was reportedly sold for $200,000 last year. The Whois information appears to have changed earlier this year.

The Bloomberg article was reporting on a start up that was funded by from former Apple CEO, John Sculley. Here’s how the acquisition of MDLive.com by Sculley reportedly went down:

“Last year, after investing in MDLiveCare, a Sunrise, Florida-based company that connects patients with doctors via video, he called the founder, Randy Parker. Sculley was insistent about dropping “Care” from the company’s name, and Parker, who was atop a ski slope in Colorado, reluctantly agreed. By the time Parker reached the bottom of the mountain, he said, he’d received another call from Sculley announcing that he had just spent $200,000 of the company’s money to buy the Web domain MDLive.com.”

I noticed the historical Whois lookup listed that the domain name was for sale on GreatDomainNames.com, and that website lists the sale of MDLive.com at $168,000.

There are a few things that domain investors should note:

1) This transaction serves as another piece of evidence that there is a huge amount of unreported private domain name sales that take place annually. I would say there are tens of millions of dollars in domain sales that are never reported. This number might actually be in the low hundreds of millions. I know of several millions of dollars in private domain sales this year that will not be reported, and if I know that much, there are many more I don’t know about. I do not report my sales unless requested by the buyer.

2) When a motivated buyer with financial backing wants to acquire a domain name, the price may be very high. I personally wouldn’t value this domain name at $200k, but the buyer wanted that much for it and he had a buyer willing to pay that much. An individual domain name is worth what a buyer will pay for it. This doesn’t mean every one of your inquiries will lead to a huge sale, but it shows you that these outliers happen.

3) Having BIN pricing may be convenient and can help move along a sale, which is great for platforms like Sedo and domain brokers, having prices set can lower the prices you realize on your domain sales. Knowing the buyer and how the domain name will be used can help you sell your domain names for more.

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

7 COMMENTS

  1. Interesting read. And yes, there are clearly tens of millions of dollars in unreported domain sales, many of which happen in exactly the fashion described here (except that they aren’t reported publicly).

    • The one thing to keep in mind is that it takes guts to turn down a $xx,xxx offer on an average domain name hoping to score a $xxx,xxx deal. Some might say it’s silly. All depends on your personal finances, negotiating skills, and knowledge about the buyer.

  2. A domain is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, but its fair value is arguably something else entirely (guided by the second best bidder).
    Anyhow, seems a little odd that an ‘experienced IT’ guy should give such a payoff with little or no attempt at negotiation.

  3. From the way the article reads it sounds like he called the owner of MDlive.com and asked him how much he wanted and the guy just threw out a number of 200k and he bit. It doesn’t sound like any negotiating happened at all.

    • Maybe, but it’s probably that he had negotiated to buy the name and then just basically decided.

      The only people who really know are the buyer and seller. It seems that the seller indicated he sold it for $168k though.

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