Domain Industry News

This afternoon during the NamesCon domain conference, Escrow.com announced the winners of its 2024 Master of Domains. The award is given to the 10 grossing domain brokers measured by the size of the deals they closed using Escrow.com during the prior year.

The top grossing domain broker for the year is Andrew Rosener of Media Options. I believe Andrew has won the award the last 6 years and been on the list every year since its inception 8 years ago. Andrew Miller of Hilco Digital was second on the list and Jeff Gabriel of Saw.com was third.

Here are the Escrow.com top 10 grossing domain brokers for 2023:

Squadhelp announced a complete rebrand this morning. The company is now known as Atom, and it acquired the Atom.com domain name in advance of the announcement. I believe Atom is a superior brand name than Squadhelp. This is a nice example of a company’s growth leading to an investment in its future via authoritative rebrand.

In this morning’s press release published below, Atom Founder and CEO Darpan Munjal commented about why the company decided to embark on this rebrand:

A few years ago, I wrote about domain names being offered up on Rally, “a platform for buying & selling equity shares in collectible assets.” It looks like the company offered fractional ownership in at least two domain names that I can see – HotSpot.com and Directions.com.

HotSpot.com currently has a $136,500 “market cap” and Directions.com has a $68,600 “market cap” on the platform. I am not familiar with the platform, but it looks like both domain names are trading for less than when shares were first available on the platform.

Dynadot just announced that it now offers customers the ability to make payments using cryptocurrency. The offering is made via Bitpay, which supports more than 100 crypto wallets and coin options. Customers can pay with Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency options. Payments using cryptocurrency are available in USD.

Supplementing the email news release, Dynadot published a blog post with full details about this new payment option. For those who wish to pay using cryptocurrency, the process seems pretty easy:

If you have adult-related domain names monetized with pay per click links at Bodis, you may consider changing where you point them. According to an email from the parking service, the company’s upstream advertising provider will no longer allow the monetization of domain names classified as adult. I suspect this may impact other parking services as well.

Here’s the email I received from Bodis with more information about the situation: