Comments (2) There has been a lot of coverage in domainer circles (and beyond) of Demand Media’s S1, most of which run along the theme “Demand Media is losing money, why would anybody invest”. Which is a good question. I remarked the same back when Godaddy’s S1 revealed that even though they were the largest registrar in the world, they too were operating at a loss.
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.
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 »
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.
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:
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.
That is the question posed by DomainSuperstar upon reflecting on the WSJ’s observation that the wealthy appear to be fleeing to tangibles such as art.
To his first question, will the wealthy start investing in premium domain names the same way they seem to be doing in art, I cannot guess. While I’ve made predictions in the past, and sometimes even happened to be correct, the main refinement to my overall investment methodology over the years since the advent of the Global Financial Crisis is that I cannot predict the future. Long story and certain to be the subject of other posts.
So who knows….maybe money does start flowing into premium domain names. I just don’t know.
What I can say however, is that there are indeed many parallels between art and domains. You can lose your shirt in both.
Hat tip to TheDomains for reporting that Neustar’s DNS resolver service DNSAdvantage is blocking parked domains with the message
Warning!
For your protection, you have been temporarily blocked from accessing www.tackboard.com. The website has been blocked for the following reasons:
- Parked Domain: Site may contain excessive advertising including pop-up or pop-under advertising”””
We leave the merits of whether this is “good” or “bad” aside. Predictably domainers will hate this, privacy people will likely not like it either, anybody who has a vested interest in monetizing parked (or expired) domains won’t like it – but the average run-of-the mill web surfer who uses DNSAdvantage probably won’t miss all those parked pages in the least.
Read more »
As I mentioned in my article about domain investing, Live Current (ticker LIVC:OTC) hasn’t done a great job of championing the concept of building a new media company around a portfolio of “category killers”. We recently heard via DomainNameWire that the former CEO of Live Current has filed a lawsuit against the company, further adding to their woes.
So, a lot of comments from the peanut gallery around my last post. Seems like people take it quite hard when you suggest that they may be throwing money into something without a sound basis for it and calling it “investing”.
Looking over Tucows annual report we find that classic setup that really can make domain names the single greatest investment in the world.
From the notes to the financial statements we find that Yummynames added anywhere between nearly 5 and 7 million dollars in revenues to Tucows operating performance over each of the last three years, that’s basically about 17 million dollars in revenue over 3 years (or a combined 25 cents a share over 3 years, currently trading around 72 cents).
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