DarkBlueSea / Fabulous "Takeover by Stacking Board" Effort Rejected

What will Plan-B look like? Upping the bid for open market shares?

[Webwork]

Reported here [darkbluesea.com].

This is a somewhat interesting "business drama" as one company - Photon, which has been busy acquiring internet marketing and webdev firms for several years - is attempting to takeover a domain registration / domain acquisition / domain parking entity. Quite a diversity of holdings by Photon.

A version of the history of this takeover effort is set forth at Michael Gilmore's WhizzBangsBlog.

The question now is will Photon persist in its attempt to wrangle control of DBS by upping its offer for outstanding shares . . and can it afford to do so, or will that serve to worsen its cash flow / balance sheet?

Also, if Photon persists might that result in Fabulous' domainer "partners" abandoning the Fabulous ship out of a concern that the takeover will involve an attempt to squeeze profits at the expense of domainers?

Interesting times. I wonder how good of a handle Photon has on the actual value of DBS's assets, for instance their "fire sale value".

One also has to wonder if there are any strawmen or frontmen involved in this soap opera, i.e., parties who might benefit by sinking the Fabulous ship in the dark blue sea. ;P

Disclosure: For some time I've parked the bulk of my domains with Fabulous, so I've been watching this wrestling match with an interested and wary eye.

[jmccormac]

It has been going on for a while. The interesting thing is how the end of the domaining bubble of the last few years is playing out. There is quite an interesting pattern of domain name shuffles between the major parking companies every month (sedoparking.com, fabulous.com etc). I think (based on looking at the domain trends over the past few years) that a lot of PPC-only domains may be extremely vulnerable over the next year or so and their values may be written down. The growth for .com TLD from 01/January/2009 to 01/August/2009 is only 51.86% of the growth for the same period last year. (.com growth was 7.38% for 2008 and 3.36% for 2009) Admittedly the end of domain tasting has affected it but there is an underlying drop in growth across most of the TLDs. Keeping with the nautical metaphors, it may all be a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Regards...jmcc