Marchex takes a big hit from product change at Yahoo.

Back in August I wrote about potential exposure Marchex has to the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal, particularly around Yahoo’s paid inclusion service. Marchex grossed about $2 million from the product in the second quarter of this year, but the product’s future was up in the air with the search deal.

Now that Yahoo has announced the end of paid inclusion at the end of the year, look for Marchex’s revenue and earnings to take a hit.

Research firm Benchmark is lowering its 2010 revenue estimate for Marchex by $10 million due to the product cancellation. Benchmark questions Marchex’s sustainability.

The product was low margin for Marchex, but was a key component of packages it sold to small businesses.
Shares of Marchex are up 22 cents to $4.97 in early trading today.

[Disclosure: I own shares in a number of domain name stocks, including Marchex.]

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Related posts:

1. Yahoo-Microsoft Deal Could Cost Marchex $8M Revenue
2. Will Marchex Dump Yahoo for Google?
3. Marchex Reduces Dependency on Yahoo

DDOS to blame for problems during auction yesterday.

Sedo’s outage during the .de domain name auction yesterday was not due to intense bidding activity, but was actually a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, reports the company.

In a statement released today, Sedo wrote:

Due to a malicious attempt to disrupt our services, Sedo suffered from two different distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks which temporarily caused the Sedo and GreatDomains.com websites to be slow or irresponsive between 17:55 and 20:15 CET on October, 22nd 2009 (11:55 and 2:15 PM EDT). Together with its protection provider, Sedo successfully fought both attacks and our websites are again fully operational. While the GreatDomains auction has concluded, to provide equal opportunities for all parties interested of the 1, 2 & 3-Character .de Pre-Auction, Sedo has extended the auction and attempted to contact and notify all bidders of the extended schedule.

Yesterday Sedo’s message on its web site during the outage and in tweets suggested that the downtime was due to intense bidding activity for .de domain names. Although bidding was indeed intense, there appears to have been more at play.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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2. Denial-of-Service Attacks hit PPC Services
3. First GreatDomains Auction Off to Solid Start

TV.de leads .de domain name pre-auction.

When .de registry DENIC starts releasing previously unavailable domain names tomorrow, you can bet a lot of Sedo’s partner registrars will be hammering the registry for TV.de.

A “pre-auction” for TV.de closed at 279,499 EUR, which is about $419,000 USD at today’s exchange rates.

The auction is still ongoing as I write this (thanks to Sedo’s web site failing under the bidding activity), but only one character .de domain names remain open for bidding. And, in what may be a lesson to other registries planning to release one character domain names, the one character domains aren’t selling for as much as many of the two character domains.

This morning I started tracking the top couple dozen domains in terms of current bid price. They’re below, with the first number in Euros and the second in US dollars. I suspect bidding would have gone even higher had the domains been guaranteed to the winner; but right now bidders are counting on Sedo to acquire the domains for them.

(unofficial results)

tv.de 279,499 $419,249
pc.de 158,700 $238,050
com.de 135,623 $203,435
bad.de 52,000 $78,000
net.de 44,111 $66,167
co.de 41,000 $61,500
öl.de 40,000 $60,000
it.de 36,100 $54,150
hp.de 31,000 $46,500
iq.de 31,000 $46,500
hm.de 30,500 $45,750
pr.de 30,000 $45,000
123.de 28,800 $43,200
dm.de 27,000 $40,500
24.de 26,100 $39,150
los.de 24,500 $36,750
bar.de 22,500 $33,750
ok.de 21,956 $32,934
dj.de 20,600 $30,900
ey.de 20,500 $30,750
tm.de 13,500 $20,250
888.de 12,100 $18,150
030.de 10,099 $15,149
666.de 10,000 $15,000

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Related posts:

1. Sedo 1 and 2 Character .De Domain Name Auction Ends Today
2. GreatDomains Auction Ends Thursday, 80.com at $60k
3. Moniker Geo-Domain Auction Ends Today