Comments Off on Revisiting the “Sweetman Protocol”: 5 Ways to Increase Your Domain Sales

After having lunch with YummyName’s Bill Sweetman a few months ago, I posted “5 Ways to Increase Your Domain Sales”, and after writing the article I took his program to heart and went out and implemented two key points from his 5-point program:

Read more »

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

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:

1. Read more »

Comments Off on Tucows aftermarket revenues vs. costs: This is what I’m talking about.

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).

Read more »

Comments Off on The Domain Aftermarket Redux, Are Domainers “Investors” Yet?

Introduction

This is the inaugural post of my new blog: webvalueinvestor.com, where I plan to write about applying a “value investing” methodology to web assets, internet companies and domains. Conventional thinking would suggest that the two are mutually exclusive. The Nasdaq bubble of 2000 and the current Web 2.0 phenomenon of “pre-revenue” companies gaining nosebleed valuations would leave us to believe this is no space for value investors. But there may be the odd value play to find out here in this space. Sometimes, value investing has nothing to do with publicly traded companies. We can approach any asset with a value mindset.

Three Years Ago I Said the Unthinkable

What better way to kick things off then to review the domain aftermarket, three years after my then infamous “Domain Aftermarket Overdue For An Asset Repricing” article which caused a bit of a stir at the time. Read more »