Domain mania is here again. Media Corp, a niche online publisher that sold Casino.co.uk in August for £3.625 million, has bought the Sport.co.uk name for £135,000 in cash, with ambitions of turning a similar profit. The name had been put to various uses over the last decade and more but had recently been put on hiatus and has been sold by its private owner via domain marketplace Sedo. Now Media Corp wants to build a global sport portal to rival the big boys, before selling on again.
“It’s got a history, it’s got good PageRank on Google,” founder and CEO Justin Drummond told paidContent:UK. “We bought Casino.co.uk for £10,000 in the nineties and, during 2000 to 2006, we were making half a million profit in ads from the business. The idea is to do something similar with sports, develop a really comprehensive sports site.”
Before Sport.co.uk can be offloaded again, however, there’s the small matter of building “one of the world’s largest sports information websites”. “The idea is to add up to 100 new articles a day; the aim is to compare it to BBC Sport and Sky Sports,” Drummond added. To that ambitious end, he will take articles and data from information service Infostrada Sports, other suppliers and in-house journalists, creating “a much bigger team”.
AIM-listed Media Corp’s other properties include listings guide OnTheBox, Gambling.com, UKHDTV and FlightComparison… all eponymously titled content plays. It also operates the Search Focus search ads technology and Eyeconomy web marketing house.