Despite downturn, Sedo revenue drops only 12.6%.
[Editor: Earlier today I wrote about the acquisition price for RevenueDirect. Here is some more data about Sedo gleamed from its parent company annual report.]
Most people in the domain business would be happy to have their 2008 revenue be only 12.6% lower than 2007. Sedo has done just that.
According to its parent company AdLINK’s annual report, Sedo’s revenues fell from €62.6 in 2007 to €54.7 in 2008.
Revenue was negatively impacted by a drop in Google Adsense revenue from domain parking and wild swings in currency exchange rates, but the company managed to keep its domain sales business steady. The company also owns portfolios of domain names, but revenue and sales from that are not broken out. Sedo counts its commission from domain sales and its share of parking income as revenue.
I estimate the company’s revenue from brokered domain sales to be about $7.5M-$10M USD, or €5M-7M based on exchange rates on December 31, 2008.
While revenue numbers were down, other stats point up. The number of domains offered for sale grew from 10.5 million to 15.3 million, parked domains increased by 22% to 6.2 million, and the number of registered members grew from 647,000 to 907,000. The company had 179 employees as of the end of 2008.
wannadevelop.com says
179 employees at Sedo or at the parent company all together?
Wow.
Andrew Allemann says
179 employees just at Sedo
wannadevelop.com says
I would of thought it was a few dozen at most.
What possibly do they need almost 200 people to do day in and day out?
Andrew Allemann says
@ wannadevelop – if this was a U.S. only company I’d figure fewer employees. But you’ve got brokers who work the phones, tech, legal, admin, marketing, etc. people, and you have to have some of each in each country. You also have European employment laws that restrict the amount of work your employees can do.
Even if it were U.S. only, I know an awful lot of companies that would LOVE to gross 300 EUR per year per employee at Sedo’s high margins.
Acro says
Q: How was that achieved?
A: Smaller payouts to parked domains.
wannadevelop.com says
Yea Andrew.. Not too many job cuts at Sedo either unlike at some of the other domainer companies. They must be doing something right.
Always liked Sedo, ever since I got involved with domains, they are involved at multiple fronts and definitely one of the best companies around in the domain industry.
They deserve all the success. Hard work pays off.
wannadevelop.com says
Acro, you choose to participate in a monetization solution (domain parking) that pays you out just random and uncertain amounts… One day it can be this much and the other day that much and if you don’t like it… Guess what? Nothing you can do about it.
Only thing you can do is take it and shut up. If you don’t like it, the only other option is not to use them. Nothing new. That is the way it is and always will be.
Adam says
only 300 euros per year per employee ?
Andrew Allemann says
Adam – yeah, yeah, OK. 300k euros
Andrew Allemann says
@ Acro – I actually have it on good information that Sedo paid out more of its revenue to customers because of the decreased parking money.
wannadevelop.com says
Andrew, I am sure they pay out more in 2009 as well… It is better to keep clients around using their services and take at least 10% – 20% cut this days VS. 30%+ as they used to.
All parking companies pretty much are doing it as they are feeling the squeeze.
The parking biz model and service as a whole isn’t as profitable as it used to be… Not for domainers and neither for the domain parking companies/operators.