Domain parking and brokerage company reports mixed results.
Last week I reported on Sedo Holding’s revenue drop in 2010 thanks to losing a keep affiliate client.
The company’s full annual report (large pdf) fills in the details on its domain business.
-Sales were down from 46.6 EUR in 2009 to EUR 43.1M in 2010
-Domain parking was down 11.5% compared to 2009
-Domain sales increased by 12.1%
-Registered members increased by 20% to 1.2 million
-Number of domains for sale increased 20% to 18 million at the end of 2010
-The number of parked domains decreased from 6.9 million to 6.5 million
Here’s where things get interesting. Sedo indicates that Google’s move to Javascript for ad serving resulted in the decline in domains on its system:
“This decline results from the rearrangement of the parking statistics as of November and is associated with the JavaScript migration of the trading platform.”
Elsewhere in the report Sedo said that the change improved traffic quality and got rid of bot traffic.
Also, my earlier report discussed a write-down in the company’s domain portfolio value. The annual report notes that the EUR 2.7 million adjustment was actually in addition to write-downs…
…for the presence of signs which indicate a stronger decline in the net realisable value than was suggested by the underlying write-downs. To take this circumstance into account, the existing method for the marketability analysis was supplemented so that four times the sales revenues of the previous year (based on annualized figures) should cover the book values of the respective domain portfolios.
The company says it “will focus our own holding of domains more intensively on domains which are marketable at short notice and dispose of loss-making domains”.
Javascript has decimated revenue by more than 50%. Can you still say Google is not evil?
Acro, I thought you said you saw a revenue boost after Javascript?
Acro, do you recall me telling you what you were experiencing with Sedo was an aberration? Now you see.
Uzoma – I’ve had no problems with Sedo’s sales platform which forms the majority of my revenue. The drop in PPC revenue is Google’s authoritarian decision. If you think that e.g. Parked.com makes you more PPC money, go ahead, you’d be shocked at the stack of $0.01 clicks.
How did the move result in a decline in the number of domains on the Sedo system?
Did folks just start to drop domains now that they did not make money, or did they transfer to some parking company that does not use Javascript? Even Parked.com now uses Javascript so I don’t know where these domains might have gone.
Sedo is doing better for me than elsewhere ATM, but hey, we’ve all learned that means nothing in parking anymore.
It’s sad to see all the parking companies so stagnant and complacent on being Google’s or Bing’s “beaten housewife” that will take any beating and still stay with them.
I’ve been on the fence for months regarding just taking all my domains out of parking and doing full time sales and say “screw the parking industry” and their inaction. I’m not sure why I am still standing on this street corner after all this time.
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