Warner Bros. Discovery Acquires WBD.com

WarnerMedia and Discovery completed a massive merger, and the combined company is now known as Warner Bros. Discovery. The news was announced on the company’s @wbd Twitter account:

We are excited to announce that WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc. are now Warner Bros. Discovery. pic.twitter.com/PscY04cK9L

— Warner Bros. Discovery (@wbd) April 8, 2022

Smartly, the company acquired the WBD acronym-matching WBD.com domain name for this newly merged media company. WBD.com is now being used for the company’s website. Whois records show Discovery, Inc. is the new registrant of the WBD.com domain name:

Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, I can see the WBD.com domain name acquisition appears to be recent.

For many years, WBD.com had been registered to an entity in Russia called Wimm-Bill-Dann. The domain name had a @pepsico.com email address for the registrant. According to Wikipedia, Wimm-Bill-Dann “is one of Europe’s largest dairy products companies.” PepsiCo acquired the company in 2010. According to historical Whois records, Wimm-Bill-Dann was the registrant of WBD.com until March of 2022. The first archived Whois record showing Discovery as the registrant is from April 8th.

I would imagine the acquisition cost of WBD.com was quite high unless there was corporate dealmaking at play. Using Archive.org, it would appear that the domain name was used as a forwarder to the WBD.ru website. Although this doesn’t really maximize the usage of the domain name, there probably wasn’t much motivation to sell the asset. Perhaps we will learn the acquisition cost in a subsequent filing with the SEC.

Acquiring the WBD.com domain name was a smart move. The domain name acquisition has been added to the list of corporate domain name upgrades kept on Embrace.com.