Marchex latest domain company to announce layoffs.
Domain name and local advertising company Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) has laid off 10% of its workforce, reports The Pugent Sound Business Journal. About 35 people are losing their jobs, although some of those are contract workers.
Marchex has made a series of acquisitions, so some of the jobs were redundant. But it’s also working to maintain a strong cash position in the 12-month old recession.
Shares of Marchex closed down at $5.39 on Thursday, down sharply from a 52 week high of $14.15.
Marchex joins other domain name companies announcing layoffs:
Oversee.net 10%
NameMedia 30 people*
Tucows 15%
*NameMedia has not directly confirmed layoffs. Multiple sources confirmed that the company did a round of layoffs.
Compared to other industries, these layoffs are small. I wouldn’t be surprised to see deeper cuts in the future, but a 10% layoff is not significant. Some companies fire their bottom 10% of employees each year.
If you’ve heard of other domain companies laying off employees or cutting back, please leave a comment.
It seems to me that many of the successful domain companies are very small and have less overhead. For development and technology, much of this is outsourced, but it keeps costs down.
Elliot – I agree. But I also think some of them got pretty fat during the boom of the past few years and need to clean up a bit of it.
I agree with you Andrew – I believe that many of them are overstaffed – Taking more and more people on in the happy days of ppc.
They need to slim down there overheads to reamin to make profits during the downturn.
What I dont get is we never see or hear of them developing there domains.
Marchex owns hundreds of thousands of names and I would say they could generate more cash actually developing some of these names instead of parking.
Regards,
Robbie