Domain Industry News

Merck, the publicly traded pharmaceutical giant, is looking to hire a Global Web Domain Administrator. The person who is hired for this position will be responsible for managing Merck’s domain names. This is an important role for a large, global company like Merck, which owns thousands of domain names across its brands.

This job opportunity might be of interest to someone with domain industry account management experience who wants to make a jump to the client-side domain name management. Knowledge of Domain Management practices is one of the requirements of being hired for this position. The job was posted on Merck’s website.

Here’s an excerpt about what the job entails:

While attempting to place some backorders this morning at DropCatch.com, I encountered an error message. Clicking on the login link brought me to an error message preventing me from logging in to my account:

“We’re sorry. An error seems to have occured. Please try again or visit https://www.dropcatch.com to speak with a customer service representative.”

@NewfoldDigital has agreed to acquire @MarkMonitor, the leading global provider of domain management solutions, from @Clarivate, underscoring our commitment to delivering market-leading web presence solutions to our customers.

Learn more: https://t.co/WdSpCXMOq0

— Newfold Digital (@NewfoldDigital) September 12, 2022

A major domain industry acquisition was just announced in a press release this morning. NewFold Digital, the company that owns domain industry brands like Network Solutions, BuyDomains, NameJet, and many others, has agreed to acquire MarkMonitor from Clarivate Plc. Newfold will pay $302.5 million to Clarivate, the company that owns MarkMonitor.

The ICA presented the 2022 Lonnie Borck Memorial Award today during NamesCon. The deserving winner of this year’s award is Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire.

Congratulations to Andrew Allemann ⁦@DomainNameWire⁩ for being named the ⁦@ICADomains⁩ Lonnie Borck Memorial Award winner! Well deserved! pic.twitter.com/iqqwb2iEgF

— Fred Kauber (@fredkauber) September 1, 2022

I have been reading DNW for many years, and I admire Andrew for his exceptional coverage of the domain name space. Andrew has always provided unparalleled and unbiased coverage of this industry, and I think all domain investors are better off as a result.

I am happy to see Andrew honored with the award that was named after a close industry friend of mine.

Thanks to Fred Kauber for sharing the news.

In a blog post on August 18th, Sav reported that its PayPal account had been inexplicably closed by the payment provider. I am sure this would have impacted the registrar’s ability to collect payments from some clients, and importantly, it would have impacted the ability to pay clients proceeds from domain name sales.

This has happened to other domain industry companies in the recent past, and they had to make efforts to get their accounts reinstated. Sav requested that customers reach out to any PayPal connections they may have and to tweet to PayPal in a bid to get their account functioning again.

Yesterday afternoon, Sav reported that its PayPal account access has been restored:

At the end of 2020, Donuts acquired Afilias and its registry business. The two companies continued to operate and are now uniting under one brand name called Identity Digital. The rebrand was introduced in a press release this morning.

Identity Digital uses the Identity.Digital domain name for its website. The company also acquired IdentityDigital.com, which forwards to the .Digital domain name. Interestingly, it looks like the company had to privately acquire the Identity.Digital domain name in April or May of this year as it had been owned by a Spanish company, according to the DomainTools Whois History tool.