Activist investor tells dot-word biz to sell off 'garbage' new domains

Well, he has a point - most of the new GTLDs are irrelevant and will never be sold in material volumes. (Is '.overlyoptimisticprojections' availiable?)

.NO

.SHIT

.SHERLOCK

Did I just read:

"Stop throwing away our money or I will make you throw away our money"

?

That said, I do agree that the enthusiasm over the new shiny-shiny shouldn't leave you neglecting your core business, though that applies whether the new thing is making money or not.

Of course, if it's not making money then that goes double because even if you forecast a new juicy revenue stream in the future, you still need your current streams to support it until that point.

Bah!

The activist investor is not at all interested in what the company does, he is interested in maximizing shareholder value. In point of fact, since he represents some sort of fund he probably has a vested interest in just bouncing the share price enough to flog it on.

Fund managers love market volatility. Shareholders usually don't. Companies definitely don't.

Expectations?

"Cannell is certainly right in that the sales of new internet extensions have been far lower than expectations."

That would be the expectations of a handful of greedy optimists who dreamt up the whole stupid extension of the tld system, as opposed to the millions of web professionals whose expectations were that sales of most new tlds would be pretty damn close to zero.

Adding costs

I was amused by:

"the user interfaces at eNom and Namejet look and feel clumsy and stale and the front-end infrastructure is untouched and acts like a time capsule to what existed half a decade ago."

Plenty of extra outlay if he wants to bling up the UI (and the non trivial costs of testing that the new all singing, all dancing changes do not create security issues).

Maybe a small number of domain buyers are interested in website bling, but majority are looking at other factors e.g. price, self host or hosted (if hosted, uptime, bandwidth costs, OS used etc.) - and a key to them is finding that information quickly & clearly

Domain provider choice tends to be driven by word of mouth (be it online or real world) recommendations / horror stories, coupled with some search engine skills.

Hmm

an investor that really should not be investing in anything new or innovative on the basis it costs money to set up.

Someone has to be the domain registrar for these, and it is unlikely to be costing substantially extra to do so.

Maybe the front end needs some polish, but that's hardly connected to what is being sold.

I guess you can't evict an investor but this is probably more damaging and distracting to the organisation than the issues he highlights.

Shareholder value can always be realised by stripping an organisation, leveraging it with debt, and other methods that are not necessarily in the best interests of the customers or the long term health of the organisation...