Some time ago I published a post called Financial Engineering: How to Triple Your Market Cap. I was referring to Marchex, a publicly traded company now worth less than $500M and founded by Russ Horowitz, founder of Go2Net, which merged with Infospace back in the day. But the strategy would apply to Marchex, as well as Name Media and any other owner of large domain name portfolio.
Anyway, the gist of that post was that Marchex - who was sitting on countless URLs and using them mainly for search marketing purposes - should bring those URLs to life by actually creating businesses, you know, websites with actual content and a purpose, instead of the kind with no content but only links to paid ads. Don’t get me wrong, the domain navigation business is lucrative, something I covered in Domain Parking Ecosystem here. continue reading...
The following is a perpetual-work-in-progress. Once you start to compile a list of mergers and acquisitions, you realize why it’s nearly impossible to have a complete list. We are quite confident that the following is a very good, comprehensive list of the largest, more notable deals… but it is not - and no list will be - fully complete because there are too many countries around the world and too many industries to report (it is highly possible that the Wall Street Journal or Financial Post, for example, has such a list… but it would be thick and unwieldy).
We have included: continue reading...
The following applies to any company in the search space that works in direct navigation, parked URL and what.
I am using Marchex because they’re publicly traded and the data is available… but technically it would also work for NameMedia, too. Bear in mind, these companies would scoff at my suggestion because they are cash generating machines, but: continue reading...
The search industry has been putting too much of a premium on paid results at the detriment of organic results.
Well, not so fast. The quintet of mass search - Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com and AOL - have focused on both organic and paid, but the laggards have not, and the market caps - and market shares - of these is a reflection. This quintet also battles for mass search supremacy, leaving a great opening for niche players. continue reading...
[Editor’s note: the following article talks about the perils of search engine marketing and the click fraud I discovered after using GoClick. GoClick is a unit of Marchex. For that scroll down halfway until Search Engine Marketing: Buyer Beware. For the background and state of the Search Engine Marketing industry, sit back and enjoy from the top.]
Last week, Business 2.0 published an article on domain-king Kevin Ham: continue reading...
