Disses Domains and Focuses on “Cash Flow Assets” — Rick Latona

Latona skeptical regarding domain market recovery and relaunches Latonas.com as web asset sales site.

Rick Latona has relaunched Latonas.com as a marketplace for cash flowing digital assets.

The site will offer any type of web asset with a cash flow for sale, such as web sites, email lists, and twitter accounts.

Commenting on the current state of the domain name aftermarket, Latona wrote in a blog post today:

It is our opinion that the market won’t recover any time soon, if it recovers at all. We feel that domains just aren’t worth that much anymore and the only way to sell one for a significant amount is to get a little lucky. Many domainers take the “land mine” approach. Meaning, the more domains they have, the more likely someone will step on one of them. This is expensive and ties up a lot of capital. We here at Latona’s aren’t regarding to go back to building a huge portfolio and waiting patiently for buyers to come to us. It just isn’t our style.

Latona writes that it will only broker specific types of cash flowing web assets:

That’s why we’ve broadened our focus to web properties as a whole but narrowed it at the same time to only properties that generate cash flow and nothing that has an asking price of more than five times annual earnings.

A couple observations:

1. This seems like a high end Flippa site with an added personal brokerage

2. Although Latona states he only wants to sell sites at five times “annual earnings”, I think he’s referring to five times revenue. You ought to always be careful regarding revenue numbers. What interests you is the actual cash flow following taking out costs. You ought to also deduct an expense for how much time the current owner spends maintaining the digital asset.

This will be interesting to watch and I congratulate Rick on his latest move.