Fairwinds Partners, a Washington DC-based Internet strategy and domain name consulting firm, is looking to hire a Senior Consultant. The job opening is based out of the company’s Georgetown (DC) office. This job may be a good fit for someone who has domain industry expertise, perhaps an experienced domain broker or domain name consultant looking to change jobs.
Here’s an excerpt from the description of what the job will entail:
In response to a thread on LinkedIn about the company that rebranded as Shield, Andrew Rosener commented that his company brokered the domain name on behalf of the buyer:
“The Shield.com domain name was acquired for the buyer by the top domain broker team on the planet, Media Options LTD!”
On the About section of Andrew’s LinkedIn profile, I noticed he invites people to contact him a via Earn.com. If you aren’t familiar with Earn, it’s a platform that allows members to earn money by reading and replying to emails sent by others via the network. Put simply, if you don’t know Andrew Rosener personally and want to contact him via Earn, you can send him a message for $5. If Andrew reads and responds, he keeps the $5, and if he doesn’t respond, I believe the sender gets the money back or an credit.
A little over ten years ago, Sean Stafford launched Domain Graduate, an educational resource to help people learn about the business of domain investing. I recall it being filled with good information that would be helpful to newcomers to learn about buying, monetizing, and selling domain names. It had a lot of good information to help people flatten the domain investing learning curve.
Up until recently, I don’t think Domain Graduate was regularly updated. I am sure the many of the topics were still relevant today, but much has changed in the business of domain investing since the book was first published. Some strategies that worked ten years ago wouldn’t make sense today, there are many new companies in the business and quite a few that have departed, and the overall business of domain investing has changed quite a bit.
Caroline Greer, Head of European Public Policy at Cloudflare, posted a tweet with the reported sale price of PIR, the operator of the .org registry. I do not have a way to independently verify the report or confirm it’s accuracy, but I reached out to Ethos Capital to confirm the sale price:
.@internetsociety webinar delivers news of the sale price of PIR > $1.135 billion, a perpetual endowment which will be managed under a new governance structure. Central issue for ISOC in considering the sale has been the risk of reliance on one sole industry (domain names).
— Caroline Greer (@CarolineGreer) November 29, 2019
There has been a lot of coverage of the news that Public Interest Registry (PIR), operator of the .org registry, is going to be acquired by a private equity firm called Ethos Capital. Many of these articles have been highly critical of the announced deal. Here are a handful of the articles and blog posts I have seen that were written in the wake of the PIR / .org acquisition announcement:
This afternoon, Team Internet AG announced that a deal has been reached for CentralNic to acquire the domain industry company “for up to US$48 million:”
Today we are proud to announce that we have become a part of the CentralNic Group PLC. We are joining a group of leading domain industry professionals and look forward to continuing to serve our partners with the support they know and trust. Full statement https://t.co/NL4wD4spuG
— Team Internet AG (@teaminternet) November 15, 2019
Team Internet is a domain name monetization company, which operates ParkingCrew and TONIC. ParkingCrew is a domain name parking service provider, and TONIC is a platform to buy and sell traffic. In the investor release announcing the acquisition, it was revealed that “Team Internet generated US$66.7m of revenue (unaudited) and US$10.6m of Adjusted EBITDA (unaudited) in the 12 months to 30 June 2019.” Based on a nameserver report from DomainIQ, it appears there are just over 604,000 domain names that use the ParkingCrew.net nameservers.
