The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
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The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
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Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#2Related past threads:
"Save .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677
"Take action to save .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582
"Why I Voted to Sell .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960
"ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#3I wrote about this too - linked in the article.
https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc-leave-1-billion-o...
The travesty is that ISOC has given up a sure-fire stream of $55+ million/year in tax-free income, along with the ability to easily grow that to over $100m/year with price increases - all for just over $1.1 billion.
As any r/personalfinance reader can tell you a rule of thumb for endowments is to spend a maximum of 4% of your assets each year. This means $44m from the $1.1bn, which means ISOC is immediately worse off than they were forecasting for this year (~$55m). Alternatively use the Yale method, which in today's low-return market will yield similar or worse results.
Moreover it's clear that ISOC are not behaving as the sharpest of investors, so we can imagine that the endowment might be be poorly managed or over-spent.
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#4The article says that a national bond fund may have fronted the endowment without turning .org into a for-profit. What does this mean?
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#5[deleted]
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#6The article says that a national bond fund may have fronted the endowment without turning .org into a for-profit. What does this mean?
They could have sold bonds (raised money via debt) as an alternative to selling .org. They probably would have gotten a good yield considering the stability of the .org revenue stream.
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#7The article says that a national bond fund may have fronted the endowment without turning .org into a for-profit. What does this mean?
They could have sold bonds (raised money via debt) as an alternative to selling .org. They probably would have gotten a good yield considering the stability of the .org revenue stream.
But would buyers of national bonds consider buying debt from a non-government entity? Would they be willing and able to model the investment without a good understanding of the Internet industry?
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#8> Take a page from the Donuts book: create multiple price tiers for popular domains, up to 100x the base rate.
> Raise rates for long-time owners of common words. They weren’t using that premium space anyway.
This is forbidden by the .org registry agreement, 2.10(c): https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-...
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could have sold bonds (raised money via debt) as an alternative to selling .org. They probably would have gotten a good yield considering the stability of the .org revenue stream.
But would buyers of national bonds consider buying debt from a non-government entity? Would they be willing and able to model the investment without a good understanding of the Internet industry?
It's a steady and safe stream of income, and the bonds themselves would be rated as safe enough. After that it's all about the interest rate, and in today's market those are really low.
Re: The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
#10black friday