Finally, Marchex is getting serious about its vast domain name portfolio.
On Tuesday I wrote about how Marchex had filed a trademark application for Archeo, and wondered if it was a rebranding.
It is…sort of. Marchex announced today that it is splitting in two:
1. Marchex will be focused purely on mobile and call advertising.
2. Archeo will hold the company’s domain portfolio of 200,000+ domains and handle pay-per-click advertising.
With the split, the company will finally get aggressive about selling and developing its domain names. It really hasn’t been proactive at all about domain sales and hasn’t taken a scalable approach: 100% of its domain sales have been through negotiation. It has just one dedicate resource for domain selling.
Still, in 2011 the company sold $9.1 million worth of domain names. For the first nine months of 2012 it has sold $5.4 million, a slower pace.
It also plans to develop a number of its premium domains, such as Remodeling.com, Cuisine.com, and Refinancing.com.
This document explains what Archeo will do.
The company also released a list of its top 500 historical domain sales.
Leave a Comment