Domain Industry News

The Half Billion Domain Auction Business You Don’t Know About

Adam Yamada-Hanff shared a link with me to a My First Million podcast featuring someone who has been active in the business of domain names but I had never heard about him or his business before. I embedded the podcast at the bottom of this article.

Sheel Mohnot runs a company called Innovative Auctions, and according to his reporting on the podcast, the company sold more than half a billion dollars worth of Internet real estate. You may be scratching your head a bit, as did I, but the company was responsible for many of the auctions involving the new gTLD domain name extensions. Many of the new gTLD contention sets participated in the ascending clock second price auctions managed by Sheel’s company. According to the podcast, the top couple of auctions went for over $100 million, although the extensions and amounts were not shared.

Here’s a description of the podcast found at the Listen Notes website:

Fairwinds Partners Hiring a Senior Consultant

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:

Domain Industry Professionals on Earn.com

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.

Domain Graduate Acquired by Epik

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.

Report: “sale price of PIR > $1.135 billion”

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:

.Org Deal: Esther Dyson is “Appalled”

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:

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