Two public companies in the domain space are in the news today
PCWorld.com put out a story entitled “The 10 Dumbest Tech Moves Of 2011“.
The story starts out:
“”I like to look back with a Grinch-like smile at the dumbest moves made during the past year in the world of tech.”
“As always, the competition in 2011 was intense. Here are 10 companies that deserve a big lump of coal in their stockings.”
In placing Demand Media in its top 10 story, the author says:
“”The purveyor of craptastic websites couldn’t make the poorly paid minions at its Demand Studios content farm happy, so it did the next best thing: sued them to stop them from complaining.”
“So far, DemandStudiosSucks.com is still standing, and Demand is still sucking. But Arianna must be happy — DM makes her Huffington Post look like the New York Times.”
On a completely different note, shares of Marchex hit an intraday trading 52 week low of $5.53 today before recovering to close at $5.67.
Its 52 week high is $10.87.
At today’s close Marchex has a market cap of just $212 Million.
Is there a fire sale around the corner with MarchEx ?
Christmas in July ?
That why it is called March EX…
March to the Ax
If Marchex stock price dips below $4.38 in 2012, its market cap at that time will be below what it paid Yun Yi for his domain portfolio ($164M).
I wonder if content farms could ever reach a level of quality that would please most people and help Demand bounce back. It seems like they’d have to find a lot of cheap “diamond in the rough” writers to accomplish that, but the way the net is going, the cost of content will be rising even from the poorer countries.
Above and beyond Marchex & Demand Media stocks clearly being lackluster performers (polite version)… What will it take for Tucows ( with the 2 Cows Logo) to trade above $1.00 per share (which is still penny stock land) for an extended period of time ??? ….as the stock did not even reach 95 Cents per share at all in 2011…even during the stock market highs
Marchex should have excluded Yun Ye’s massive list of some 80,000 + zipcode domains and just bought the rest.
They apparently thought they were going to do this zipcode network, but that never got off the ground. How unsexy , or uncool, or boring, to search by your zipcode on a regular basis?
They made a mistake and are now paying for it. I’d imagine they could still pull out of this though. They do have some great domains. They need to cut the overhead and have a good biz plan to execute. Maybe that’s what they are doing. It seems we never hear anything about them anymore.
Clobert Rhine” – “It seems we never hear anything about them (MarchEx) anymore.”
You wont hear anything but bad news – sell the stock now if you own it – owning .com’s is not a business for publically held companies to be in. I am salivating over theier dumps – save your dough
marchex could do:
city.state.NNNNN.com
where NNNNN is a zip code.
who needs new tlds?
The joke is on the author of that PC Magazine article, as Google is still pre-paying Demand Media to upload more video “content” to YouTube & has syndication deals with many newspapers that were built in part on the spin of how wildly profitable eHow was.
Another big name dump coming…
Content farms still remain one of Google’s biggest challenges and, as with all of these type of things, smaller, legitimate sites will be caught in the net.
Crazy to see that market cap of $212 million, as there are a handful (maybe a couple handfuls) of private domain portfolios worth more.