Publicly traded company Blucora, Inc. were the buyers and the domain name began forwarding (redirecting) to HowStuffWorks.com. Blucora Inc. was InfoSpace.com until switching names to Blucora Inc. in 2012 and InfoSpace became a subsidiary of Blucora. Blucora had recently acquired How Stuff Works from Discovery Channel for $45M and then acquired Stuff.com.
Q-10 for Blucora for April 2015, page 8 there is a line indicating Internet Domain Names with “Gross Carrying Amount” from the past quarter of $0 and a “Gross Carrying Amount” of $696 for the current quarter as displayed in the chart below.
I researched all the filings for Blucora, and of my findings, the same terminology is used every time when a domain is mentioned. So I would consider that line “standard” for them, no matter if it’s 1 or 10 internet domain names they purchased specifically (not considered an asset from another company).
I have not seen Blucora “hide” domain names they have purchased in the past. Once they purchased Stuff.com, whois data showed the company in whois and it didn’t go behind whois privacy for an example. This is a common pattern and I wouldn’t expect them to hide any domains under whois privacy, because it doesn’t fit the pattern of what they do.
Read MoreConsidering that Blucora paid $45M for just How Stuff Works, add in another $696,000 for Stuff.com, and pile in all the rest of the “internet and search business”, OpenMail got a pretty good deal! Some of the domains included: Zoo.com, Dogpile.com, MetaCrawler.com, MetaSpy.com, FetchLocal.com and InfoSpace.com to mention a few...
