Over the weekend, the business section of the New Zealand Herald featured an article about the growing business of Escrow.com. Featuring some insight from Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie, the article offered some insight into what Escrow.com does and how the company has grown into “almost a monopoly” in the domain name space. As you may recall, Escrow.com was acquired by Freelancer.com for $7.5 million USD in 2016 (the deal was announced in 2015).
In July of 2018, George Kirikos, an advocate for the rights of domain name registrants and domain investors (and self-described “long-time critic of ICANN”), posted a poll on Twitter asking people if he should start a blog. Nearly 150 people voted, with more than 2/3 choosing the “definitely” option:
I’m considering finally launching a blog to provide my insights into the world of domain names and #ICANN in long form (more than 280 characters!). If I launched such a blog, would you read it? #uncensored #unvarnished #FreeSpeech
— George Kirikos (@GeorgeKirikos) July 14, 2018
In a blog post this morning, Efty announced its clients can now implement a live chat functionality on to the domain names listed within their Efty marketplace, allowing domain registrants to talk in real-time with prospective buyers. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:
“We’ve teamed up with Tawk.to to bring forever-free live chat to your Efty marketplace site, allowing you to communicate with buyers in real-time, either from the advanced Tawk.to dashboard or directly from your mobile device while you are on the go.
Donuts is looking to hire a Chief Marketing Officer, according to a job posting on LinkedIn. The CMO job opportunity was posted about a week ago, and it looks like there are 90 applicants via LinkedIn so far. I believe Jeff Davidoff was the last CMO at Donuts. It looks like he left that position in June of 2016, and I don’t believe it was filled after his departure. The CMO job will be based in the company’s Kirkland, Washington office.
Here’s an excerpt from the job posting that describes the Chief Marketing Officer position at Donuts:
Verisign posted a job opportunity I thought might be of interest to a reader who has experience within the domain name industry. Verisign is looking to hire a Senior Registry Platform Manager. Among other things, Verisign operates the .com and .net domain name registries. This job opening was posted on LinkedIn this past week, so now may be a good time to apply for the job as one of the first job applicants.
Here’s an excerpt about this position from the job posting:
Natasa Djukanovic is the Chief Marketing Officer of the .ME registry, a ccTLD extension from the country of Montenegro. As you probably know, .ME has been positioned as a mainstream generic TLD with an alternative meaning to its country code utility, since its domain names became available to register a little over ten years ago.
Thrive Global, an online publication founded by Ariana Huffington, recently published an interview with Natasa, and it is a good read. The interview offers some background about the .ME registry team along with some of its early marketing and promotion strategy. Here’s a brief excerpt of Natasha sharing some background about .ME:
