In a bidding frenzy today, retail toy giant Toys R’Us helped to ensure its future in the online toy world by ponying up $5.1 million for domain name toys.com.  Toys R’Us, purchased for $6.6 billion in 2005 by a KKR led consortium (in another auction), outbid domain holding company National A-1 to come out on top.

While the retailer’s own domain of toysrus.com already ranks well for search query toys, (comes up #2 in google), passing up an opportunity to own the best domain for the industry could prove a costly mistake should toys.com emerge as a new online contender one day.  Who knows what the retailer’s strategy will be with the new asset, but even sales generated from redirecting type-in traffic ought to quickly pay off the purchase.

Tags: KKR Toys R'Us

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Private Equity News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.