Sedo cites domain parking woes for revenue drop.
Sedo Holding has issued its preliminary results for the first nine months of the year. This is likely to be one of the last public reports from the company before it gets rolled up into United Internet.
The company’s affiliate marketing division saw revenue growth, but the domain business (what you know of as Sedo) continued to decline.
For the first nine months of 2013, the company had sales revenue of EUR 20.8 million, a 13.3% year-on-year decline compared with the previous year’s EUR 24.0 million.
The number of domains parked at Sedo was up from the end of last year (4.1 million vs. 3.8 million), but the company cited “the domain parking market’s overall downtrend” for the revenue drop.
As of September 30 there were 16.4 million domains listed for sale on Sedo.
Sedo Holding is lowering its revenue forecast for the year.
The full nine month report will be published in the next couple days. [Update: here’s the formal 9 month update (pdf)]
I have my domains parked at NameDrive and the graph of revenue is now almost vertical and total waste of time really. A pittance compared to what it used to be like 3 + years ago
My revenue has increased, then again I left sedo 2 years ago, Sedo your customers pointed so many things wrong with your business model you thought Godaddy would save you, ended up sinking the ship. RIP
Where re your domains parked?
It’s worst than anyone may think right now. DNW should look at the recent GoDaddy/Academy summary judgement and tell me if there’s not a big sign of ‘class action’ against parking companies all over it?
My revenue has been increasing also. I’m at Internet Traffic mostly.
I’m now doing early 2008 numbers again. It’s not quite 2007, when earnings were great,, but it is almost there.
Sedo, even eight years ago, paid almost nothing for traffic. Why would they pay better now? All the serious traffic owners left them years ago. Sedo thought domain investors were stupid I guess, but they were the stupid ones. They lost the real players with great traffic and domains.
I’ve never seen such company go down so easily without fighting at all. They have done zero to turn this problem around.
Bottom line is that Sedo’s reports are a reflection of a poorly run company, not the industry.
@simlayon For sedo to have increased their parking revenue payouts (re: “without fighting”) would have been an admission that they were paying out too little and being too greedy. Thus IMO they just stuck their head in the sand and pretended that nothing was wrong and hoped that people wouldnt realize. Well, they did. Goodbye sedo.
@Simlayon. If your numbers are like 2008 “again”, then you have a very specific portfolio which I would like to analyze or what most probably is the case you have been 2008 on a very bad revshare.
I still have bad results at Afternic …where to park domains?
I am using dopa.com. better than sedo.
@ Ivan – It won’t matter who you try. Parking has been dead for several years now. It’s a complete waste of time and effort. Especially since the Google search algorithm updates of the past couple of years, which immediately recognize a parked page, or, ” thin site “, and relegate them to below the basement in the SERPS.They do not get indexed.Unless you get a large volume of type in traffic
for a domain, you’d be lucky to make enough back to pay the registration fee
with parking.
Many of the principle players at Sedo have already jumped ship over the last few years, because they could see this coming with each quarterly report. Sedo, Afternic, etc., etc., should just drop the parking platform entirely, and concentrate on what they are – domain auction houses.
At this point, there’s only two ways to reap any measurable profit from a domain:
Develop it, or sell it.
I still use sedo, but everything goes through a above.com
Parking is not dead. I think it’s Sedo unfortunately that is dead.
Really I think that there is just too much of an unrealistic, overhyped
expectation in the domain business right now that is basically impossible
to live up to. Also like in many other industries GREED seems to be the
pivotal reason the domain business is in decline currently, and as much
as I love Google, I have to say their recent moves have not helped.
Think about it — their are over 110,000,000 .com registrations currently
and proably less than 1% of those are actually domains that were even
worth the registration cost not to mention earning “parking revenue”.
If you are a domain investor now more than ever you need to focus
on QUALITY and not quantity, or else you will not survive. but to say
the industry is dead just because a few greedy rich players and a couple
of domain registries in the domain industry are taking a bath seems
to be an over statement, this actually could end up being good for the
domain business in the long run.
Maybe Sedo’s parking revenue is declining because they are making stupid decisions. Case in point – I parked a domain there that had been in use, but I was no longer interested in maintaining. It received some traffic while parked with Sedo from previously indexed pages. Because it was getting more than 1 or 2 hits per week, Sedo accused me of “cheating” even though everything about the domain was above board and complied with their TOS. They canceled the parking and kept the generated revenue. I then removed all of my domains from my Sedo account.
Basically…. Sedo sucks.
SEDO also changed quite a few things on their parking platform; for instance, they disabled ALL images (photographs, etc) from parked pages (they are now text only for anyone who has not noticed; they claim text-only pages have been shown to perform better) and did away with many of their templates in favor of new generic ones. They have taken much of the control away from the domain owner.
The text only may have a couple reasons. It might work better on mobile. They might also qualify to get past Ad Block Plus. (Incidentally, Sedo co-founder Tim Schumacher is an investor in Ad Block Plus).
I am using dopa.com