Dark Blue Sea reports another drop in domain parking revenue.
Australian domain name company Dark Blue Sea, which runs Fabulous, reported another drop in domain parking revenue in its latest quarterly update. Just two months ago Domain Name Wire wrote about how the company’s parking revenue from its 600,000 domains was down 18% in just one quarter.
The news isn’t getting better. In the quarter ending June 2008 the company earned $1,003,000 from its company owned parked domains. That’s a further 27% drop in just one quarter.
To be sure, Fabulous sells a lot of domain names in any given quarter, but it is very apparent that its revenue per domain is falling. The company blames a number of factors for this fall:
– the weaker economic environment in the US
– generally fewer advertisers (as observed by Dark Blue Sea) leading to a reduction in bid prices and coverage and hence overall yield received by Dark Blue Sea
– changes to the way that online advertisers can place advertisements via the advertiser interfaces of the major search advertising networks; and
– an overall uncertain strategic landscape stemming from the unsuccessful takeover bid for Yahoo by Microsoft and the subsequent outsourcing of search advertising to Google by Yahoo.
The news isn’t all bad. Dark Blue Sea’s quarterly revenue from parking other people’s domain names is holding steady. It generated nearly $3 million for its clients last quarter. Dark Blue Sea kept about 24% of that; 76% was paid in revenue share and other expenses. It also sold $2,779,000 worth of domains last quarter compared to only $638,000 the same quarter last year.
Unique Domain Names says
This is not all that surprising to me.
Johnny B. Good says
It seems to me that many of Fabulous’ domains are not that fabulous – so to speak, and thus may the real reason for the downward spiral, meaning Google is further “Smart Pricing” their domains down.
If this is not true, then why did their client’s domains not spiral downward as well, given all their reasons for the downturn?
Andrew says
@ Johnny – they’re parking more and more domains on their service to make up for the drop in earnings per domain.
Many of their domains are long-tail. Even though they get less traffic the should convert fairly well.
Rob Sequin says
Andrew,
I think you missed the story here.
Headline should have been domain sales up over 400%
“It also sold $2,779,000 worth of domains last quarter compared to only $638,000 the same quarter last year.”
I mean really? You buried this on the last line of the story?
That’s HUGE news.
Adam says
I’d say the news is far from bad!! Not a bad increase at all..!
Andrew says
Rob, it’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s all that relevant to most domainers. DBS sold more domains because
-its distribution partners (including GoDaddy) are going “online”
-It sold one domain for $250,000
-It sold portfolios of domains to investors
Obviously good news, but I don’t know many people who have 600k domains to sell off
Bill says
All this means is that private domain sales are getting hotter because more and
more people are buying up the .com’s that
are still un-registered,even the crappy ones.
That naturally increases the value of the good names.I own over 2000 names and i’m
experiencing a huge increase in e-mails from
people and companies interested in buying my undeveloped names.Parking is old news,either develop or sell outright.I’m doing both.