Silicon Alley URL registrar Register.com said a $32.5 million write down of goodwill related to its acquisition of Afternic fueled wider net losses in the third quarter this year.

Last September, Register.com shelled out $48 million in cash and stock to acquire the domain name marketplace and after writing off most of the value of that deal, Register.com reported net losses of $28.8 million (77 cents per share). In the same quarter last year, the company posted a loss of $145,000, or break even on a per share basis.

The third quarter net loss also included a reversal of a tax valuation allowance of $1.9 million, the company said.

Excluding the Afternic-related charges, Register.com said it recorded a profit of $1.8 million, or 4 cents per share.

Even as actual domain name transfers and registrations continued to slip from quarter to quarter, Register.com has turned a post-tax profit in the previous three quarters, driven by consistent revenue growth.

In the most recent quarter, Register.com said total revenues increased 20 percent to $29.5 million, up from $24.6 million in the same year-ago period.

The company, which maintains headquarters in New York and call center operations in Canada, said URL registrations, renewals and transfer continued to slip, totaling 497,000 in the third quarter.

Three months ago, Register.com said it registered, transferred and renewed approximately 505,000 domain. Since the first quarter this year, transactions have dropped a whopping 68,000. With increasing competition in the domain registration space, the company has seen transactions decline dramatically since the fourth quarter of 2000, when it registered 842,000 names.

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The company ended the quarter with $188.9 million in cash, no debt and cash flow from operations of $4.9 million.

Separately, the company said its board of directors plan to use its cash in hand to purchase up to $10 million of outstanding stock over the next 18 months.

The company has also unveiled the WebSiteNOW product, a tool that lets domain name registrants build, host and maintain Web sites. Register.com said the $249 per year site-building tool integrates text, images, and links into templates.