Steady, Brandable Domain Sales Growing — Tucows’ Revenues
Tucows notes stable revenue and increase in brandable domain sales.
Tucows today noted earnings of $.07 per share for the third quarter, compared to a loss of less than a penny per share in the same quarter last year. The firm benefited from income from its final receipt for selling its stake in domain name registry Afilias, as well as from foreign exchange gains. Revenue held essentially steady compared to last year.
On its investor conference call today, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss noted strong sales of “brandable” domains through its YummyNames division. The firm sold regarding $250,000 worth of these domains, on top of direct navigation domain sales. The total YummyNames take for the quarter was $1.782 million counting parking revenue.
The firm doesn’t expect as much revenue from direct navigation sales in the future since it has cleared out a backlog. It has a regular agreement to sell regarding $100,000 worth of expired direct navigation domains every month or two, Noss explained.
Noss also alluded to a future partnership with NameMedia to list brandable domains for sale:
The number of brandable domain name transactions has shown great progress through September and continue to accelerate in October. We expect this to be helped further as we finalize the deal to list our domains in the buydomains.com and afternic.com market places and distribution networks, which we view as the best buy now marketplaces in the secondary market.
When adding expired domains to its portfolio, Tucows plans to focus on the brandable name segment going forward:
…So over the couple of few years that we were sort of taking the [exit] from our expiry stream, we built up a bit of a backlog of those direct navigation names and you remember those are the names that are really valued on a multiple of revenue based on their traffic, not for in any way their value to a firm who might want to name themselves or use the name line of business and we are really focused on those brandable names.
