There’s a great thread on Domainstate discussing Marchex.
DomainEngineer wrote:
They can make a lot of money if they just park their names
Earleir today while reading “Every Business Is A Growth Business” I came across a related quote:
Complexity is not the sign of an intellectual gift. Making things simple is.
Larry Bossidy, CEO Allied Signal (91-97)
If you were running Marchex, what would you do? And if you were to advise Marchex, what would you say to them?
Give me one example of a Marchex site that has real value to the end user where users walk away from saying “I got more information than I came here for that must have been a Marchex site”? This is what you get from a CNET or Amazon.com, they deliver more and have sustainable business models… What is the business model here… we got out sites indexed by Google but the users had a shit experience and BTW our indexed sites make nothing compared to if we just parked them. Come on - it not really very hard to figure it out- take the top 30 golden domains and build them into authority sites NOT openlist scrape sites but bankrate.com’s - something that has value to the end user not just GOOGLE… It kind of blows me away that there is this big mystery about what should be done… Would you rather be Markus (plentyoffish.com) or all the hundreds of unused great dating marchex domains? Please tell me the openlist- loanconsolidation.com is going to get your approval or nextstudent.com - I get it that building out sites is hard but one ehealthinsurance.com http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EHTH dominating one vertical beats 200,000 flat sites in marketcap today. I am still a huge bull on Marchex, they have amazing assets, i like that they have figured out a system for zipcodes/ indexing into GOogle but does http://www.90210.com/ provide any real value to the end user and is this the leading charge of what the domain industry is putting forward as our future of our assets. pls tell me if there is anything that would make your directly navigate back to 90210.com If I really wanted a good 90210.com site, i would put a human edited index with a good blogger / RSS up against openlist anytime.
It is easy to bash someone when they are down, marchex will come back and make many people who buy now wealthy but they need to look deep and not broad.
The Marchex stock is undervalued, in my opinion. I agree that Marchex has not done much with its domains so far, but at some point in the future Marchex will decide to develop single domains. They own so many generic domains that it should not be difficult for them to launch online businesses each worth as much as Business.com or CreditCards.com. So far Marchex has been working on maximizing the parking performance of their overall portfolio, which is a reasonable strategy, of course, but I think they should finally consider developing some of their top domains.
I would get Frank Schilling, Kevin Ham, and Yun Ye on the board of directors.
Fire half the staff. Outsource development. Sell one great domain to “prove” the value of the domain portfolio. Get a three year vision. Figure out what the street wants. Sell out to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.
After that beating on Friday I think all of the above are options on the table now.
To start off I would do the following:
1)I would tie in directors/officers performance with salary. Then fire a few officers and hire some new ones from google.
2)You have the cement now go build a foundation and a building what are these guys waiting to do, crush the stock price down so they can take it private themselves?
3)Get a domain leasing program going with an option to buy the domain name later. They cannot possibly develop all the names they have, they should lease them to other companies in exchange for a percentage of the company 5 or 10% this way they have resiudal income for life. Why be at mercey of google and yahoo they can destroy your ppc at any time. Cost per action will lead the way, abuse leads to restriction on pay per click its just a matter of time. This will force everyone to acutally build better websites and content which is good for everyone. (except people who just park it), its great now ride it out but in 3 years companies will demand something better.
4. Marchex needs to dump all trademarked names they have to much liability and they have cash on hand to go after. The regualar domain owner with a few trademarked names will not be touched because they dont have anything to go after. Not worth a companies time unless they have something to go after.
Big reasons why company is going down See below.
Insider Purchases - Last 6 Months
Shares Trans
Purchases N/A 0
Sales 603,250 21
Net Shares Purchased
(Sold) (603,250) 21
Total Insider Shares Held 88.64K N/A
% Net Shares Purchased
(Sold) (87.2%) N/A
To much to list on what they could I could go on for hours.
Don1 *IDM*
283 full time employees what the heck are all those employees doing all day long reading Business 2.0 Marchex should learn about web 20 and user generated content… partner with others ,lease domains,rent to own,cancel all the TM domain registrations.
What a waste of domain names. The stock price is where is should be will probably go down even further. They depend on payperclick to much. Start to develop these names and get some people who know what they are doing.
200000 DOMAIN NAMES? That is nice and all but you should take the top 100 and start to develop them.
If I owned this company I would hire that Don1 and follow some of that advice.
I will buy when it hits 5 or 6.
show all your properties.
get rid of the nap.
hopefully in the end there will be something resembling a Family of premium properties.
my opinion is sell the properties while you still have a chance, in a few more years it may be all over.
What all those 283 full time employees doing??
Look at Frank Schilling apparently he earn around $20 million a year from his portfolio.
And mostly is one man show, even if he has people working full time for him I wouldn’t think are more than ten
Myzine.com
Share Videos, Photos & Audios
Take the business international to make the most of the best investment opportunities available where not just the internet, but economies are developing at breakneck speed.
Recruit talent in the main non-English commercial languages.
Improve the general quality of the portfolio, and dump all the endless crap, typosquats etc.
Focus on fewer names and go for high end development.
Attempt to buy out portfolios of IDN ahead of the market.
Will they do this? Not a chance!
Let me see if I got this right. 283 employees? The previous owner had how many employees? If you do the math at 10 million monthly uniques divided by 283 employees divided by 30 days and you have a STUNNING number. 1200 daily uniques PER employee!! Sorry, I just have a hard time with so many employees and little or no growth. JMO
Big market valuations cannot shield firms from economic forces forever. Marchex cannot afford not to globalize. They can take half their existing seats and shift them half a dozen at a time to Lahore, Colombo or Kolkata.
They can begin slowly shifting customer service, basic HR functions, accounts receivables and website content management. Then bulk up to 200 seats offshore to provide enhanced customer service, expanded business hours and more expansive website content (including user-generated content).
Add video, photos, community features, news feeds, blogs and mashups from other sources, such as mapping. Begin making content available in languages other than English.
By lowering their operating costs, Marchex will be able to increase their PPC payout rates for third-party domains parked with them. Their current PPC payout rates are among the worst in the industry.
Advertisements publicizing their increased payout rates and attract more parking clients. They can also offer site development services for prime third-party domains parked with Marchex on an annual or multi-year basis with owner-optional escape clauses in the event that threshold PPC performance rates are not achieved. This will enable Marchex to add value to third-party domains.
U.S. personnel should be used for QA and for establishing valuations for domains that can be offered for sale. Other U.S. companies are quick to identify spin-off opportunities that can add value to the core enterprise. Marchex can do the same.
Anthony Mitchell
InternationalStaff.net
Here’s my $.02
Like most others I have a hard time seeing why this company needs 282 staff members…
Most have suggested development of the top 50 or 100 sites… I would probably only go with the top 5 sites and focus on making them authority sites. Once they’re self sufficient and turning a profit I’d move onto another 5.
One simple solution… Outsource.
I agree with Floyd, outsourcing is the best cost saver… especially if you have so many staff.