Live Current Media pulls out a profit after cutting costs.
Live Current Media has reported a profit for the third quarter of 2009. The company released earnings of $703,000 on quarterly revenues of $1.757 million.
The move from the red to the black wasn’t due to a better top line; it was due to drastic cost cutting. Revenue was down 10%, but gross margin was up from 18% in Q3 2008 to 32.7% in Q3 2009. General and administrative costs were down 74% compared to the same quarter last year.
The company’s main revenue producing asset now is Perfume.com. The company has completely exited the cricket business with the sale of cricket.com and the assignment of its cricket rights. It also has a 55% ownership stake in Karate.com, which went live as a web site this past quarter.
Live Current Media has announced that it reduced the salary of its CEO from CDN$300,000 to CDN$120,000 effective February 1, 2009.
Snoopy says
It looks to only be a profit because of $1.2million profit made from the sale of domains. Otherwise there would have been a $600-700k loss. Certainly though they seem to have cut costs alot but the probably only had a couple of quarters left the way they were going. Still I’m somewhat surprised at the change.
It looks like the will have to cut costs signifcantly from here to stay in the black though they can probably limp on selling more domains for a few quaters yet. Really they need to reduce operational costs by about 50% from here to be breaking even. I do wonder how much longer current management is going to stick around.
Andrew Allemann says
Snoopy – yep, selling their inventory of high quality domains will only get them so far.
Stock Watch says
Since Karate.com went live, it has done very well in the SERPs and even replaced a current active martial arts site in the top spot on Google.
While that may seem to bode well for the future, a quick scan of the Karate.com forums reveals most threads are about 50+ days old and a poll that hasn’t changed since launch.
Many of the traffic estimate sites show an increase in traffic, however it’s interesting that Alexa shows most of the traffic is from India, which I suppose is going to be the new hotbed of martial arts enthusiasts who may or may not benefit from that directory of local US dojos.
Hopefully there will be some updates to Karate.com soon.
Alan says
While Perfume.com is a pretty good site, you have to admit Karate.com is just a really bad site. Nothing attractive at all – same monetization elements used by people new in the business (adsense, amazon) when you would expect more from a company such as LiveCurrent.
Karate.com probably makes a few hundred a month the way it is – imo its a complete waste of time the way they have build it.
Cindy says
I agree with Alan.
Karate.com sucks for a publicly traded company. I could throw that together in a day, less the graphics.
Domain Investor says
Earlier today, I thought the samething as Alan and Cindy. But, I didn’t want to criticize the Karate website, thinking it is in beta.
That is the type of site one with limited resources would initially start with.
Karate.com has a lot of potential. They need to do something like what Jeff did with Student.com .
Some of the karate schools (with limited resources) have better sites than Karate.com . Shame on them.
Even NameMedia puts up better websites which is not their primary business than Live Current. Photo.net
Alan says
Domain Investor,
criticize away is my opinion – you have the luxury of using an alias so say your mind. Too many people pat each other on the back in this industry for nothing more than a job only 1/4 well done.
People listen – good words or bad words. i know I do.