Domain Industry News

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.

One of the paid tools I use daily is the Dropping.pro email alerts. I created 3 alert emails with different parameters, and each morning, I receive 3 emails with domain names coming up for auction that have certain attributes that may make them appealing to me.

Since the launch of DomainLeads.com, I have been copying names from the Dropping.pro emails and doing a bulk search to add another search layer and identify even better targets. I previously wrote about how I have been using DomainLeads.com. Interestingly, I have found myself saving money rather than spending more, but that’s a different story.

The DomainTools Domain Monitor tool has been an invaluable tool for me in uncovering domain name sales and transactions. I monitor tens of thousands of domain names, and when DomainTools detects a change in its Whois record, I receive an alert notifying me the following morning. The tool has been greatly impacted by GDPR and similar privacy laws, but it has continued to help discover when domain names change hands or transfer.