Partners at MSNBC, Microsoft Acquires Today.com

According to the current Whois record for Today.com, it looks like Microsoft recently acquired the domain name Today.com, and it now forwards to MSNBC’s Today Show website. Prior to Microsoft’s ownership, it appeared to be registered by a company called Marksmen, Inc. which has been known to acquire domain names on behalf of large companies like Microsoft. Prior to that, it was privately registered, and just before that, Domain Capital was shown as the registrant.

MSNBC was formed as a partnership between NBC and Microsoft, and according to Wikipedia, Microsoft owns 18% of the joint venture (as of 2005). When I learned of the Today.com acquisition, my immediate thought was about the Today Show. According to Compete’s analytics, Today.com receives close to half a million unique visitors per month.

The new domain name is certainly better than the laborious one being used currently, today.msnbc.msn.com. As with most private sales of this nature, the sales price probably will not be disclosed, but it is possible that it could appear on a financial report from Microsoft since the company is publicly traded.

Thanks to George Kirikos for the tip.

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Written by Elliot Silver on May 3, 2010
Posted in: Generic Domain Names
Tags: marksmen, microsoft, today.com

Comments (11)

New Yawka

May 3rd, 2010 at 1:07 pm

The money should have been used making the Today Show better. As it stands now, the show might disappear because of weak ratings and the name will be sold to other hands.

heather

May 3rd, 2010 at 1:12 pm

maybe the value of today.com could be expressed as [yesterday.com] – [tomorrow.com]

cant tell

May 4th, 2010 at 3:58 pm

I know the guy who sold it, I have sold him a LOT of domains in the past.

He has turned down offers as high as $5 million, so this certainly went higher than that.

However, this website (which was fully developed) was receiving tremendous traffic and generating revenue.

heather

May 4th, 2010 at 4:18 pm

r l?

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May 10th, 2010 at 12:32 pm

[...] to this new blog post (blogs are sometimes more reliable than news sites these days), MSNBC (Microsoft-NBC) and Microsoft [...]

Brian

May 18th, 2010 at 11:12 am

Good for them but bad for those those of us like me who had a blog on Today.com. It would have been nice for them to at least let us know they were going to change where we, as bloggers, could have prepared for this change. I had been blogging there for over a year on health and fitness and to lose all of this traffic and all of the work associated with creating it is just not right without some kind of warning.

Elliot

May 18th, 2010 at 11:13 am

@ Brian

Were you able to get the content back? Did you have a back-up?

Marisa Wright

May 22nd, 2010 at 5:25 am

This is a cautionary tale for everyone who blogs on a free site. You can never be sure when the site will fold!

Even if you keep a backup of your site (which I have), you’ve lost all the traffic and all the Google juice you earned.

June 19th, 2010 at 6:39 pm

Hope you’re right, Microsoft’s next earnings report is out on July 22, 2010 so it would be interesting to see if there’s some sort of indication of how much they paid.

Attempts to reach the contact @ Marksmen were bounced back.

July 21st, 2010 at 11:24 pm

@Elliot – Curious to see if Today.Com’s sale price can be found somewhere in that Microsoft earnings report that comes out Thursday (tomorrow).

It appears that the commenter “cant tell” might have been referring to the same person/group who had been looking at a range much less than 5million just a couple of years back.

March 8th, 2011 at 12:55 pm