Posts tagged: Godaddy

Why I Sold Tucows

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By , August 4, 2014

It’s  hard post to write, but on Friday I sold most of my remaining shares of Tucows. Last year – before the reverse split I sold a little more than half, and just now I sold most of the rest.

I invested in Tucows back in 2005 or 2006  for reasons which were admittedly, more emotional than savvy. As I began to learn more about investing and in particular, drank the value investing Kool-Aid , I added considerably. Specifically in 2008 I realized that a conservative valuation of their aftermarket domain portfolio (a.k.a “Yummynames”, before Yummynames actually existed) was worth more than twice the actual market capitalization of the entire company. It was surprising to find such a textbook value investment so close to home, but after I got over that it was easy to pile in and buy more, and more, at an average cost of $0.65/share (or $2.60 post-reverse-split adjusted)  finally doubling down in 2012 at roughly $1/share (or $4 post-reverse-split).

Selling Tucows after being a shareholder for over a decade was hard. Canadian value investing guru Irwin Michaels expands on why “selling is hard” in his interview in “Stock Market Superstars: Secrets of Canada’s Top Stock Pickers” (cheesy title, good book): Read more »

Comparing Godaddy’s and NetSol’s price tags

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By , September 11, 2010

I was going to comment directly on Domain Stryker’s article about Godaddy’s vs NetSol’s respective price tags, until I read that he was putting me on the spot to say something half clueful about it over here 🙂

My initial comment was to the key differences between the prospect of Godaddy being bought for 1 Billion today and Verisign’s purchase of Network Solutions for 28B back in the dotcom heyday was this: Network Solutions included the registries for .COM, .NET and .ORG.

ICANN later forced Verisign to divest out of the registrar side if they wanted to renew their contract for the registry (and they were also forced to let go of .ORG as well)

So for 28B, Verisign got the .COM and .NET registries, for what looks like in perpetuity. No matter how big Godaddy ever gets, at $8.88 a domain or so, they will always be paying the lions share of it to Verisign (well, for .COM and .NET’s)

That’s not to say Verisign got a bargain on NetSol. They locked up the registry, but given the times, everybody was paying nosebleed valuations for everything, but consider this:

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Reading between the lines of Demand Media’s S1 (hint: there’s more cash than you think)

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By , August 10, 2010

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.

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