Domain Industry News

New Escrow.com Payment Address

As you may have already heard, Escrow.com has moved its US headquarters to San Francisco. As a result of this move, the payment address for correspondence and wire transfers has changed.

For me, the most important aspect of this notification is that I need to update the address of Escrow.com in my wire transfer profiles. I am not sure if future wire transfers made using  the former  address will be impacted, but it is better to make this update than worry about them not going through.

Here’s a copy of the announcement I received along with the new address and current phone numbers:

Divyank Turakhia on CNBC

Last week, I wrote about the news that Media.net  was being acquired for $900 million. Although this was not explicitly domain name investment news, the fact that Media.net was founded by longtime domain industry veterans Divyank and Bhavin Turakhia made this noteworthy.

Shortly after the news of the acquisition, CNBC posted an interview with Media.net CEO Divyank Turakhia. The topic of the interview is “why the $900 million acquisition deal by a group of Chinese investors made sense.”

I just saw the interview, and I embedded the video below so you can have a look:

West.cn Launches West.xyz

west.xyzChina-based domain registrar West.cn has launched West.xyz, a website  that appears to target the English speaking audience. The company will continue to operate its West.cn website separately from West.xyz. It is unclear to me whether they are two separate domain registrars or if West.xyz is simply another website operated by West.cn.

The news was announced by West.cn on Twitter this afternoon and retweeted by Shayan Rostam of the .XYZ Registry:

According to nTLDStats.com, West.cn owns the largest market share of registered new gTLD domain names. At the time of publication,

Big Brand Domains Bought via Escrow.com

Screen Shot 2016-08-24 at 8.28.43 AM
When I visited Escrow.com this morning, I noticed something that I had not seen before. The company has a graphic showing a group of logos of Internet brands below a heading that says “USED TO PURCHASE SOME OF THE BIGGEST DOMAINS ON THE INTERNET.” For your convenience, I shared the graphic above.

I presume this means that the domain names for these brands were bought via Escrow.com:

Luke Webster Launches Kickstarter Campaign

Luke Webster, a domain investor who is well known for his shaving-related startup, has launched a Kickstarter project for Shave Scents – The Shave Soap Solution. The Kickstarter campaign, which started yesterday, has a goal of $10,000.

Here is an excerpt from the campaign page with a bit of information about the product:

“Shave Scents is a uniquely combined 2 part wet shaving system. We have custom mixed the Scents to our extremely popular Pre-Shave Oil. This oil has recently been re-formulated to mix with our soap which allows our savvy customers to build a 2 in 1 lubricating luxurious lather with pre-shave properties built in (think of it like shampoo + conditioner + your desired scent + awesome). We know you’re going to love it. We have been working on this for nearly 2 years. We are excited to see the unique scent recipes / potions you discover with our alchemist kits.”

I embedded the campaign video below so you can learn more directly from Luke:

Media.net Acquired in $900 Million Deal

Media.net logoIt was quite impressive to learn that Divyank and Bhavin Turakhia had sold Directi to Endurance International in a low 9 figure deal. After the deal, the brothers retained their Media.net property, and that business has continued to grow and thrive (who said you need to have a .com to create a massive company?!).

This morning, another Turakhia deal was covered in Forbes, and it dwarfs the Directi deal from 2013. Here’s the jist of the deal written about in Forbes:

“AdTech pioneer Media.net, has been acquried by a Chinese consortium from serial internet entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia’s Starbuster TMT Investments in an all-cash transaction of $900 million.”

If you add those two deals together, that is $1 BILLION in deals. Wow!

I wonder what’s next for Div. It looks like he has the golden touch.

Recent Posts

.Com Doesn’t Matter in Some Countries

5
If you've been fortunate to spend time traveling to other countries, you'll quickly learn that .com is less important to businesses in some countries....

Saw.com Announces $100 Million in Domain Name Deals

1
The Saw.com domain name sales brokerage and sales platform announced a milestone this morning. The company surpassed $100,000,000 in domain name deals. I presume...

That Company May Cease to Exist

1
I received a strong offer on one of my one word .com domain names last week. I declined, but in the process of doing...

Auction Platforms Shouldn’t Benefit from Default Bidders

13
If the winning bidder for a domain name auction does not pay and the auction platform offers the domain name to the next highest...

LTO is Betting on the Buyer and the Platform

2
When you agree to a lease-to-own (LTO) domain name deal, you’re making two bets: one on the buyer’s ability and willingness to complete the...