June 8, 2018

Donuts acquires BudURL, re-brands it as BL.INK

The acquisition aims to increase awareness and use of new TLDs by providing relevant value-added services.

domain registration

New gTLD giant Donuts has acquired link management company BudURL in order to increase the awareness and usage of new TLDs. By acquiring BudURL, Donuts seeks to leverage its existing domain name registrar channel and sell the link building platform by rebranding it as BL.INK.

According to Donuts, link and URL nomenclature play a vital role when it comes to clicks. They believe that a short and easy to read URL makes a huge impact on social media and marketing by making the link relevant and readable.

Donuts say that BL.INK enables customers to create shortened links based on their domain name. They explained that instead of providing meaningless links such as dhy.ly/Swor457fh for a brand like Coca-Cola, BL.INK will provide its shorter and contextual version like Coke.URL/3, enticing the reader to click the link.

Speaking about the benefit provided by BL.INK, John Pollard, Executive Vice President, Donuts Registry, commented:

Short links are a digital marketing essential – for any size business. Every digital interaction should reinforce your brand or convey your message.

At Donuts, we saw an opportunity to offer a better product: links that use real words. We found the best link management platform, and for the first time ever, customers can create custom links using brands and other meaningful, memorable, real words.

Donuts say that through the wide reach of their channel, BL.INK can reach businesses of all sizes. Explaining this, Pollard added:

BL.INK is another example of our commitment to find and develop new value-added services for the domain channel.

With BL.INK, our partners have an unprecedented opportunity to benefit from the economics of this rapidly-growing space. (…) It’s a win-win-win-win, for BL.INK, for Donuts, for our partners and for their customers.