Latest Oversee.net offer price places value at 760M (down 32%)

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By , July 29, 2010

A new batch of Oversee.net shares just listed on sharespost at 4.37/share, placing the company valuation at 760 million. This is down 32% from earlier share offers at $7.35/share which would have put the company at 1.16 billion. Kinda, sorta. No recent transactions have actually taken place, just offers. So we don’t truly know an imputed value of Oversee until we see a sale actually take place.

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Are you a loser if you can’t “make it” as a domainer?

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By , July 23, 2010

I wanted to circle back on Rick Schwartz’s near rant against people who can’t seem to follow his advice and “make it” in the world of domaining. In fact I’ll cite the exact same quote as I did in my earlier post about the .CO launch:

I think all these bozos are about to be schooled. Yesterday EVERY domainer had the EXACT [same?]  opportunity to speculate and win or lose. All the big mouths will have their jaws dropping soon as they watch folks manufacture money from thin air. This proves they have no talent and just whine. Losers in every sense of the word. While others are enjoying success and creating even more, they will still be saying the same crap or sitting on the sidelines spewing hate instead of jumping in and do what a true domainer does and have the balls to speculate. If they can’t make it in domains which is a gift from the heavens, they will make it in nothing.” (emphasis added)

It’s a pretty stern assertion out of Rick, which I took to mean: If you can’t make it in domains, you can’t make it anywhere. I find that a very puzzling stance to take.  [ This sentence was reworded after Rick’s comment – M] Read more »

Are you piling into .CO domains? Good luck with that.

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By , July 22, 2010

The big buzz throughout the domainer circles this week is the launch of the .CO domain and domainers are busy talking up a storm about, not to mention everybody is piling into it. Some specialty .co aftermarket channels like flipping.co have already emerged, and of course, there are a few blockbuster aftermarket sales announced already.

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Bill Sweetman: 5 ways to Increase Sales of your Aftermarket Portfolio

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By , July 16, 2010

Bill Sweetman manages the Tucows YummyNames domain portfolio, and Tucows’ office is right down the street from mine. So after reading my articles on domain investing and Tucows, Bill suggested we meet for lunch. We hadn’t met in person until now even though we’ve been working in close proximity for awhile.

Over the course of our lunch we talked about managing aftermarket domain portfolios, and the higher margin business of selling domains to end-users at retail prices. When your cost basis is low (and in Tucows’ case it is basically the cost of wholesale registrar registration), it doesn’t take much to lock in healthy margins and decent profits.

5 key takeaways came out of our meeting, and Bill was good enough to expand on some of them via email later:

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Does Looksmart look cheap?

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By , July 6, 2010

Shadowstock is a another very interesting niche blog that covers “Deep Value Micro Cap Investing” and I’ve been following it for awhile. Once of his more recent ideas as a possible Ben Graham net/net is Looksmart (Nasdaq:LOOK), the “second tier” Pay-Per-Click search engine.

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Online, offline, value-investing still requires a wide moat.

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By , July 5, 2010

A lot of people want to “invest” in websites and domain names. As value investors we have the same requirements for an online investment as we do for an offline one or a publicly traded equity:

  • We can buy it for less than it’s intrinsic worth
  • Safety of principal combined with reasonable return
  • A durable competitive advantage or a wide-moat

Between these three simple criteria, we can eliminate probably 99% of the “opportunities” we see out there to “invest” in a web business or a domain name….

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Morgan Linton: Domaining done right.

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By , July 2, 2010

I think domainers like Morgan Linton are a credit to their profession. He’s basically sharing his knowledge as he gains it, and he’s doing it in a way that isn’t derogatory to people “who don’t get it”, and also isn’t self-aggrandizing.

What strikes me about his accounts of developing kayaking.org is his overall approach and mindset to building this asset out.

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