Off 15% of Staff — Tucows Lays

Registrar blames industry and macro conditions for downsizing.

Domain registrar Tucows (AMEX: TCX) disclosed today that it is laying off approximately 15% of its staff. Tucows is just the latest domain name firm to succumb to a deteriorating domain name market and economic crisis. A few months ago Oversee.net laid off 10% of its staff (removed link that is no longer active).

Yesterday Tucows disclosed earnings with a modest loss for the third quarter. [Update: Tucows stock down 32% today].

In a statement on the Tucows’ web site, firm CEO Elliot Noss stated:

…We decided to take this step since of the uncertainty of overall economic conditions and the fact that our performance has been impacted by a number of unanticipated challenges during the first nine months of the year, counting advertising revenues being dampened by the weakness in the economy and by reduced payouts to the domain channel by Google and Yahoo, which is in turn impacting domain portfolio advertising revenues and especially bulk domain portfolio sales.

I have also never seen a macro economic environment like we are seeing now. I am old enough to have lived through a number of down cycles but there are elements of this one that make it unique and that will take time to work through.

I am immensely proud of the great work our team has done together this year. The product launches of Butterscotch, Hover and Storefront. The brand launches of OpenSRS and YummyNames, and the smooth email migration to our fresh platform.

We are luckier than most in that what we sell, domain names and email, is more like milk and bread than like cars and refrigerators. We are also luckier than most in that we generate cash and will continue to…