I read a brief post on DNW.com about Sedo’s annual results, so I wanted to look at the whole annual report in more detail, it can be found here. AdLINK is really composed of two divisions, the first being affili.net and the second being Sedo.

Unfortunately there isn’t too much information regarding Sedo itself, such as it’s gross margin and costs (only group costs can be found), so it’s really difficult to judge how well Sedo is really doing. The only interesting number is Sedo’s revenue for 2009, which came in at 46.6 milion EUR. That was a fall of 14.8% in comparison to 2008, when revenue came in at 54.7 million EUR.

The big question is what this revenue is really composed of. My assumption is that Sedo books only its 10% sales commission as revenue but books its entire parking revenue as revenue. I.e what it gets from google is counted as revenue and what it pays out to parking partners (domainers) is cost of goods sold.

If this would be the case, brokerage commissions amount to probably 7 million EUR of the total revenue (Sedo says it sells $8 million worth of domains a month) and the remainder, about 40 million EUR revenue would come from parking. That’s about $52 million a year, or less than $5 million a month.

That’s pretty small and it seems that in fact Oversee is an even bigger leader in domain monetization than I thought, probably being more than double the size of Sedo in terms of monetization revenue. Conversely, Namedrive looks like it’s coming much closer to Sedo than I previously thought.

I don’t want to pronounce Sedo as the laggard of the domain industry yet, but it seems like a former champion of the industry is losing out in the battlefield, at least in the short term.

Share|