Sitebox rapidly scaling down as it is no longer strategic to company.
Local search and advertising company Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) is scaling down its third party domain name parking service Sitebox. Company executives believe the service is no longer strategic to the company.
Sitebox produced revenues of $5 million in the first half of the year, but less than $1.5 million in the third quarter. The company expects revenues to drop further to $0.5 million in the fourth quarter.
During the company’s latest investor conference call, Marchex CEO Russell Horowitz said focusing on premium content partners and its own traffic sources provides greater relevance to its advertisers:
With Sitebox, we viewed that as a potential opportunity to focus on third-party geo domain owners. What we have found is working with premium publishers and our own traffic sources and websites gives us a greater degree of ensuring relevance to advertisers, and so that transition didn’t necessarily happen in the manner that we thought it might. And with that in mind, recognizing we’ve got no shortages of opportunities that we think can drive real equity value creation, we went ahead and made the decision to focus those resources in these other areas. We have greater control for these relationships.
Sitebox is (was) an exclusive domain parking service targeted mostly to owners of large geo domain portfolios.
RegFeeNames.com says
PPC is down in a serious way obviously this is going to effect the revenue that is generated over the past year.
Marchex are getting out of the game because they are a small player compared to Parked.com – TrafficZ.com – NameDrive.com etc
They are finally admitting there defeat – The worrying thing for Marchex is that alot there revenues are down because there whole portfolio isnt making the same cash it was onw, two or three years ago – They need to really focus on selling there domains to make cash.
It’s the only way they shall surrvive is if they start pitching domains to endusers who my wish to own some of the great names they own.
My thoughts only.
Regards,
Robbie
Johnny says
So….they still are working with premium publishers from the way it sounds.
Then some domainers must have got termination notices and others not. Just a guess.
Andrew says
@Regfee – but Marchex actually has a good amount of cash right now. It is using most of the money it does make from domain sales to buy back shares.
Andrew says
@ Johnny – you’re right. It seems they were getting better results from the content network.
WQ says
Probably too many well paid employees to make such a simple thing profitable.
Otherwise, this is really one of the easiest, most profitable businesses online.
FX says
They couldn’t make it profitable ??
Granted sitebox was a piece of shit with no stats, horrible landers and no real analytics technology behind it. With that said, why shut it down ? Surely it can run itself and be profitable even at small scale. end results, They simply DONT GET THE DOMAIN SPACE.
Mike @ WannaDevelop.com says
They probably shut it down due to “FRAUD” that is why most operations usually close shop… Or because it just wasn’t successful enough. You will always see people FLOCK to a new service as it looks very promising and they say they can deliver this and pay that, etc…
After a few weeks people login to check their stats and find out that they actually LOST money and that the service isn’t what they first though… So they take their domains to the next service. There is a few dozen PPC parking companies so round and round they go.
After about a few month’s, they hit their peak after some buzz… But it really quiets down fast and this services that are just a “me-too” product get forgotten.
Domaining 101… You are welcome.
Mike
Max says
The whole domain parking industry is so slimely and annoying that they may have just decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. It also detracted from the reputable aspects of their business.