The Marchex earnings call yesterday reveal some interesting facts about Archeo the business that Marchex is looking to spin off to a separate public company later this year.
It appears Archeo is set to become the first publicly traded company whose only business is one of being a domainer:
“I’d like to highlight that we’re narrowing Archeo’s focus on the buying and selling of domains, along with the select development of proprietary websites.”
Pretty much how I would describe a domainer.
As previously communicated, we believe there’s an opportunity to create a leader in the domain marketplace and for us to unlock the value of our more than 200,000 domains.
For the second quarter, including domain sales, Archeo revenue was $6.5 million consistent with the first quarter. Excluding domain sales, revenue from Archeo was $5.1 million.
In our earnings release today, we announced the sale of certain pay-per-click publisher relationships as part of our effort to increasingly focus Archeo’s business on its premium domain marketplace.
In July, we sold some of our pay-per-click third-party distribution relationships that were part of the Archeo business for proceeds of up to $2.6 million in order to provide greater focus and opportunity around creating a premium domain marketplace. Those relationships contributed $1.4 million in revenue and approximately $100,000 in adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter, and we’re on pace to contribute approximately $3 million in revenue and $200,000 in adjusted EBITDA for the remainder of the year.
Matt Lebo with Piper Jaffray asked the Board about the average domain name sale over the quarter which was down to $18,500
“When you look at the domain sales that you had over the quarter, the average amount is about roughly $18,500 per sale. Isn’t that kind of reflects the portfolio that you still have and the value of it?”
Russell C. Horowitz – Founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Treasurer
“The averages can vary fairly significantly depending on a smaller number of transactions in any given quarter. What I will say is that as we’ve invested in a Archeo, and adding people in systems that allow us to launch a marketplace and scale this business, the yields that we seeing reinforce our belief that we have a lot of asset value to unlock here.”
…
