I actually approached other official publishers prior to putting domain up for auction to see if they're interested. From about a month and half before the announcement. Sadly, I either never got a reply or got turned down. I found that so stupid. They spend so much more money on advertising already and they were willing to let go of an extremely effective promo ability.
I'm not too surprised; from their perspective it's probably not clear what the risks of such a move would be. Like as not they'd have to be in a risk-taking mood to even go as far as to consider the proposition seriously.
And then Legal might balk at the idea of knowingly doing any financial transactions with a known pirate entity; indeed the vague notion that this would be dealing with criminals will hang over the whole consideration (copyright violations aren't necessarily a crime, even if you can sue over them, but that's not the public perception).
And then PR and similar might reasonably be concerned as to what sort of message this would project; the move could be misinterpreted either by their content providers overseas (which could get really awkward), or even by the some of the community they were attempting to attract (Thinking something like, "Damn legals bought out batoto and shut it down," perhaps).
And the benefits wouldn't be clear, either. A lot of advertising departments are very concerned with measurable effectiveness as expressed in numbers and metrics (I think possibly overmuch, but that's another discussion), but guessing at those numbers for this would be in advance would basically be impossible because it's non-standard advertising.
Even considering all of this thoroughly could take a good chunk of time and money.
And then, as the coup de grâce: When faced with a certain and an uncertain option, people will tend towards picking the certain one. So yeah, I can't say I'm really surprised.
(Of course, I could be entirely off-tack as I have no idea what the corporate culture at these companies is like. This is just what I'd expect if the subject was broached in any of the larger corporations I've worked with/for.)
Edited by pokari, 31 January 2018 - 11:19 PM.