Media Corp, a UK company that specialises in Internet marketing with a focus on the online gambling sector, has put Gambling.com on sale to raise money for acquisitions. How much is it worth?
The company has bought catchy domain names and “flipped” them on in the past – Casino.co.uk went for £3.62 ($5.7) million and Casino.de for €400,000 (£338.m) .
CEO Justin Drummond, in his announcement, comments: “Whilst Media Corp has significant cash reserves, we have recently seen a number of exciting acquisition opportunities in the online gambling and online advertising space. The successful sale of gambling.com will give the group the financial resources to go after these acquisition opportunities.”
Today, Gambling.com is a gambling portal that sells advertising space. The site used to be a gambling search engine selling clicks to advertisers along the Google Adwords model, but that particular market dried up when the US banned online casinos.
So what´s it worth? Gambling.com ranks #1 in Google for “gambling”. So that already gives you an indication.
Slots.com was sold this year for $5.5 million. Whether or not the buyer will get a return on that investment, is another story, but that sets a benchmark.
If we do a “back of fag packet calculation” (that´s back of cigarette packet for any US readers out there), and look at the monthly searches for “gambling” in Google adwords its: 1,500,000 per month.
“Slots” gets 2,240,000 a month according to Adwords (notoriously unreliable, but we are interested in relative values here, not absolute numbers)
If we make a direct comparison with slots.com, and assume that most of the value comes from the search engine potential, that gives a price tag of $3.7 million.
BUT, slots is probably the most lucrative niche in the betting market. Plus gambling has some negative connotations (people with gambling problems might be searching “gambling” to find help and information). So that shaves it down to $2.5 million in our book. Factor in inflation for 6 months and pure market craziness/greed/nutters buying, and we would estimate a value of $3 million. The more nutters watching the hammer fall down at the auction, the better for Media Corp and Señor Drummond.
Having said that, we wouldn´t fall off our chair if it went for more than that. There are alot of nutters out there with too much money.
My advise to purchasers is this- if you are just buying it for the SEO potential, try and value gambling.net first. (Just for a reality check before your emotions get the better of you). Value the .net and multiple by 10 for the .com
