Company continues push to make NBC honor sale of Women.com and .net.
DONE! Ventures has filed an opposition (pdf) to NBC Universal’s Motion to Dismiss its lawsuit over a failed transaction for Women.com and Women.net.
DONE! had agreed to purchase the two domain names through NBC’s broker Sedo for $1 million. However, NBC backed out of the deal after it was allegedly vetoed by NBC Universal President & CEO Jeff Zucker. DONE! sued to force NBC to complete the deal.
NBC then filed a Motion to Dismiss, arguing that a contract for the deal had not been formed. Its chief reason was that there was no “meeting of the minds” since DONE!’s communication with Sedo mostly referred to Women.com and not the .com and .net.
This is rather suspicious given that NBC pulled completely out of the deal rather than going ahead and suggesting they complete the deal at $1M for just women.com.
In its response to NBC’s Motion to Dismiss, DONE! says that both domains were marketed as a pair throughout the process. Sedo’s sales page for Women.com even mentioned that a sale included the .net version. DONE! drew an analogy to buying a house:
By analogy, a real estate broker may market a picture of a home on the Internet as being for sale but the detail page includes a reference to the home, a garage, and a yard. The real estate buyer is purchasing the entire package, not just the home in the picture. Here, defendants’ detail page made clear that something more then Women.com was included: two domain names were part of the offer.
Along with opposing the motion to dismiss, DONE! filed declarations (pdf) from its founder Ben Padnos (an early Yahoo! employee) and domain broker Alan Hack, who assisted Padnos with the transaction.
chris says
A million dollar sale for NBC doesn’t even move the needle in terms of their net income. They will spend more on legal fees then they would get by selling Women.net by itself.
Jon says
Women.com value to NBC as strategic asset is well over $10 million. NBC obviously screwed up by signing the contract, but at this point they will spend $ millions to get out of it. In short, Done will never own women.com.
Einstein says
women.com is priceless, especially when you have an entire network like NBC /GE behind it.
Women make 50% of the population and probably 75% of spending decisions. Whoever decided to sell it for 1 million deserves to be shot, Ok, maybe just fired.
Andrew Rosener says
Good luck Ben!
I hope you really nail down NBC. Nobody deserves to get away with just walking away from a contract like that.
roddy says
Also a lot of the women will be checking this site out once tv and the internet combine
Louise says
@ Einstein said: “Women make 50% of the population and probably 75% of spending decisions.”
Women may spend the dimes and nickels to save $$, but men, numbers-wise, are the big spenders in the thousands, tens-of-thousands, and millions, and who make the big mistakes.
Tim Kissane says
Surely it’s in Sedo’s best interest to enforce the completion of the sale. How can anyone bid in good faith if the buyer can just back out like that?
Andrew Allemann says
@ Tim – yes, Sedo wants the deal done. It doesn’t hurt that they have a $100k commission on the line. Expect them to try to collect on the commission and get the deal to go through to the extent that it can.