I've been told by a reliable source who wishes to stay anonymous that the domain name WE.com sold for $8 million. The sale was confirmed earlier in the year but price and details of the transaction were never disclosed. In an earlier article, I was able to confirm that the brokerage fee was around the $1 million mark, which allowed us to speculate that the final sales price may have been around $8-10 million. However, I can now reveal that the final sales price was $8 million, and the domain name was sold to Tencent - China's largest Internet service portal and creators of WeChat, a free messaging and calling app used by over half a billion people. The brokerage fee was reportedly 12.5%, which would mean that my article earlier in the year about WE.com's brokerage fee was right. The 12.5% commission is Sedo's standard commission agreement and was broken down into two agreements: firstly, a 10% brokerage fee. Secondly, a 2.5% fee for the brokerage firm not to reveal the price paid. As Sedo was the main broker in the deal, I reached out to Sedo to ask whether they could confirm any of the details above, but naturally they couldn't. This $8 million sales price would put We.com at the 7th largest domain sale on record, only $500,000 behind FB.com. Update on Aug 24, 2015: The WHOIS information has been updated to show the registrant as [email protected] as the owner. This email address was used in the $300,000 acquisition of Heika.com by Tencent Holdings (owners of WeChat).
Good info James.I'm glad I subscribed and I enjoy seeing alerts and knowing it's another wonderful article.
So the buyer (or seller?) paid a whopping $200,000 to Sedo to keep the aquisition price confidential and know all the details are public anyways. I personally would be pissed off.
Great sale price I'm happy for the seller and broker. It's nice to see that they waited for the best offer and didn't hurry to sell it, many people would have accepted low or mid 7 figures.
Sedo should pay back that fee. They get the success fee and the publicity, not fair that they also get paid for not keeping the deal private when it benefits them that it wasn't.
I don't think seller paid the regular Sedo fee. The fee for the sale of vodka.com (a 3-million sale back in 2006) was negotiated too.
They should know better than to pay Sedo that absurd fee. Actually, they should know better than to use Sedo at all. Now they know. This information should be public. I'm glad that it is now.
They paid 8 million to use as a redirect for the site its going to? O.o I must be missing something here..
Update: The WhoIs information has been updated to show the registrant as [email protected] as the owner. This email address was used in the $300,000 acquisition of Heika.com by Tencent Holdings (owners of WeChat): http://www.namesell.com/chinese-mystery-company-pays-us300000-for-heika-com/
Wow this is a nice story to learn about. I am interested in seeing what they plan on developing this into. It seems like they are looking for a short name, two letters and turning it into a holdings company or something more?
Even as Ron has confirmed it too, Sedo was brokering we.com along with we.cn, see the post by Frank Tillmanns here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wecom-wecn-sale-frank-tillmanns So curious, did it sell along with we.cn? Appears that went felt aside.
