Flying.com Purchases UsedAircraft.com

Flying.com parent firm adds another web site to its collection.

UsedAirplanes, Inc., the parent firm of Flying.com and UsedAirplanes.com, has purchased the domain name and web site UsedAircraft.com to add to its expanding arsenal of web properties.

Earlier this year the firm purchased Flying.com for $1.1 million. I interviewed firm President & CEO Mark J Horne at the time, and he explained the decision as a “no-brainer”:

“On an investment standpoint, if you had a million dollars cash right now, what do you do with it?,” asked Horne. “Stick it in the bank? You’d make $12,000 a year in interest on that money…you can’t stick it in the bank. To put it into an asset like this where I know the business well, it was a no-brainer.”

In justifying the buyout cost of its fresh buyout, Horne made points familiar to domain and web veterans:

The keyword “used aircraft” is one of the most highly used keywords in Google, Bing and Yahoo for people searching for used aircraft. On a monthly basis, Google, Yahoo and Bing will process a number of hundreds of thousands of search queries for the keyword “used aircraft” and millions more for search queries relating to “used aircraft.” These figures do not include all the users that forgo the search process by putting UsedAircraft.com into their URL or have the site bookmarked.

“UsedAircraft.com has been online for over 15 years and their long history gives them a compelling indexing value relative to the major search engines overall ranking algorithms counting: Registration and Hosting Data (specifically the 15-year time value); High Trust/Authority (of the Host Domain); Link Popularity (of the Specific Page); Anchor Text (of External Links); On-Page Keyword Usage (throughout) and Traffic and Click-Through Data. The fresh website will also focus on increasing the Social Graph Metrics,” stated Horne.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but with added development costs the deal was described as a six-figure investment.