Domain Industry News

Update: After publishing this article, I heard from Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie (Freelancer is the parent company of Escrow.com). Matt told me the information in the article is incorrect, and these countries were added to the “do not service” list in error.

Matt’s full statement to me is here:

“The article is erroneous – we do service those countries listed today.

We updated our compliance processes yesterday and moved a few countries to a higher risk category in the database, which seems to have auto-populated the website for our “do not service” list which is incorrect and we are getting corrected immediately.

To be clear, we continue to support China and Israel.

The only restriction that I am aware of in that list is that there is a total goods embargo BETWEEN the countries of Turkey and Israel currently.”

Escrow.com maintains a list of countries / regions from which it does not support payments. Buyers and sellers in these regions can not receive payments or disburse to bank accounts from these countries. In 2019, Escrow.com made some waves when it added Russia and the US state of Alabama to this list. Since then, the state of Alabama seems to have been removed from this list.

In its most recent update, Escrow.com added 18 countries/regions to its list of countries not supported by Escrow.com. The two countries that stood out the most to me are Israel and China. I know of many domain registrants who live in these two countries, and I also know there are many businesses in these two countries that acquire and use high value domain names.

If you’ve been involved in the domain name investment space for more than a minute, you know – or at least know of – Divyank Turakhia. Div, as well as his brother Bhavin Turakhia, is a billionaire who got his start in the domain space. I am pretty sure he is still involved with the industry. Ron Jackson wrote an article about Div’s background in DNJournal, as did Wired.

With competitive UEFA Champions League matches starting this week, I thought it was neat to learn that Div reportedly became an investor in Atalanta, an historic Italian football club:

Rob Schutz is a relatively new entrant into the domain brokerage business, but he seems to be finding success acquiring domain names on behalf of clients. For those of you (like me) who don’t know Rob personally, Rob co-founded Ro, which has become a $7b direct to consumer healthcare company. You’ve probably seen their advertising. In addition, Rob worked at a startup called Bark.

Most recently, Rob founded Snagged.com, a domain brokerage firm, which is how I learned about Rob and his background. Rob recently participated in an interview on the Starting Small YouTube channel. If you aren’t familiar with Rob and his background, you can watch this video to learn his story and how he became involved in the domain name space.

It has been a little more than three months since Squadhelp rebranded itself as Atom.com. As with any rebrand and domain name changes, there can be some temporary or lasting issues as a business attempts to keep its search engine rankings and informs users and prospects of the new brand name.

Atom.com Founder Darpan Munjal posted an update today to share how the rebrand has gone for the business naming platform that specializes in the sale of domain names. The first post in the thread can be seen here:

In a blog post published this morning, Efty announced its Efty Pay platform was launched today. The domain sales payment platform is launching in gradual steps, and the platform is now available for Efty subscribers to test drive with imported leads closing at a 3.5% introductory commission rate.

In its introductory blog post, Efty also shared the roadmap it intends to use in becoming a full-fledged transactional platform. In the future, domain name sellers will be able to list their domain names on Efty landers, and buyers will be able to purchase the domain name without leaving the Efty ecosystem. They will be able to list their domain names for sale in multiple currencies, be able to negotiate with buyers through the platform, and offer different payment plan options.