Scott Hopkins wrote a piece on Seeking Alpha today stating that the new gtlds were the last chance for Demand Media. Demand Media has been languishing in the stock market for awhile now. The stock is down 25 % this year and is down 46 % over a one year time period.
Demand Media owns Name.com and Enom and that is where Hopkins believes the magic has to happen. He is not a believer in the Demand Media web properties such as eHow and LiveStrong.com. He refers to these sites as digital sharecropping, always at the whim of another Google algorithm update.
So if Demand Media is going to make a turnaround, Hopkins sees that happening with the new gtlds. It is worth noting some of the registrar figures Hopkins used in his hypothesis are not accurate. His reference to Name.com as having roughly 500,000 registrations is way off compared to latest numbers from registrarowl.com, they put Name.com at 1.2 million as of December 2013.
The article actually quotes Michael Berkens referring to a post he wrote in 2012 but its really just a post on a poll
Michael has already responded to Scott on seekingalpha.com as he believes he has been misquoted but nice to see that confirmation that people from outside the industry read thedomains.com
From the article:
Summary
- New domain name extensions are being released daily. Will people use them?
- DMD needs to move away from reliance on search engine traffic.
- Profitability will depend on eNom and Name.com versus GoDaddy.
Right now Demand Media owns Name.com and eNom wholly. They also own a stake in Namejet. As far as market share is concerned, as you might expect, GoDaddy.com is the leader, with about 30% market share and growing. Second, is eNom with about 8% market share. Name.com is hardly relevant with approximately 500,000 domains registered and less than 1% market share.
eNom is in a valuable position at second place and growing. At over 6 million domain names registered, the company has 20% of the business GoDaddy, the undisputed leader in domain names, accounts for.
The most important element of the success of Demand Media’s domain name companies will be to how well the new gtld’s are promoted and how well the registrars promote them. However, even with great promotion, new TLD’s fail.
He goes on to discuss .CO although he focuses too much on the O.co situation and not the fact they have 1.6 million regs and that they just got bought out by Neustar for $109 million. I think every new string would love that scenario in the long run.
Read the full article here
