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Advertising - Friday, November 2, 2007

Domain Overlord Name Media Files IPO

Waltham, MA's NameMedia has filed for an IPO that may be worth up to $175M. It expect to trade on the Nasdaq as NAME. NameMedia is the first of the domain roll-ups to march on Wall Street. Others in the oligarchy include Marchex, Oversee.net, and Demand Media.

NameMedia runs an online marketplace that for domain names that counts 2.25M names that are owned both by the company (NameMedia owns about 750K domains) as well as third parties.

For the quarter ended September 30, NameMedia saw net income of $254K on revenue of $21M. Net income was $170K on revenue of $16.4M in the prior year’s quarter. Online media (mostly ad sales) accounted for about 54% of revenue in the most recent quarter with domain name sales and services accounting for the rest.

Will Name Media go on an M&A tear after the IPO? That's likely as it plans to use proceeds of the IPO to repay a $105M loan as well as for possible acquisitions.

Name has raised $43.1M from Highland Capital Partners (which owns over half of the pre-IPO shares) and Summit Partners.

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