Parking Revenue Down, Sales Up — Sedo Domain
Domain parking and brokerage firm notes mixed results.
The prior week I noted on Sedo Holding’s revenue drop in 2010 thanks to losing a keep affiliate client.
The firm’s full annual note (sizable pdf) fills in the details on its domain business.
-Sales were down from 46.6 EUR in 2009 to EUR 43.1M in 2010
-Domain parking was down 11.5% compared to 2009
-Domain sales increased by 12.1%
-Registered members increased by 20% to 1.2 million
-Number of domains for sale increased 20% to 18 million at the end of 2010
-The number of parked domains decreased from 6.9 million to 6.5 million
Here’s where things get interesting. Sedo indicates that Google’s move to Javascript for ad serving resulted in the decline in domains on its system:
“This decline results from the rearrangement of the parking statistics as of November and is associated with the JavaScript migration of the trading platform.”
Elsewhere in the note Sedo stated that the change improved traffic quality and got rid of bot traffic.
Also, my earlier note discussed a write-down in the firm’s domain portfolio value. The annual note notes that the EUR 2.7 million adjustment was actually in addition to write-downs…
…for the presence of signs which indicate a stronger decline in the net realisable value than was suggested by the underlying write-downs. To take this circumstance into account, the existing method for the marketability analysis was supplemented so that four times the sales revenues of the previous year (based on annualized figures) ought to cover the book values of the respective domain portfolios.
The firm states it “will focus our own holding of domains more intensively on domains which are marketable at short notice and dispose of loss-making domains”.
