I have some nice news to report this afternoon. Bari Meyerson, my former Account Executive at Moniker, has been hired by Enom  as a Senior Business Development Manager.

I received an email from Bari today confirming the news, and it looks like she’s happy about the move.  “I’m very excited about joining the Demand Media ‘family.’ Demand Media has a solid foundation of providing quality services and together we have an excellent opportunity to grow the business.”

Having a trusted account manager at a domain registrar is reassuring to me, and I am excited that Bari moved to a company where I have an account and do business.  As a result of this hire, I plan to transfer a group of names over to Enom.

Congratulations to Bari and Enom on this smart hire.

News release from Enom is below:

Bari Meyerson who left her Sr. Account Manager position in December 2011 at Moniker, has accepted a new business development position with Seattle based registrar Enom.

In her new role, Bari will be responsible for growing/managing Enom’s existing domainer client base as well as targeting domain investors. In addition, Bari will be focused on identifying strategic opportunities around domain parking, premium names, and value-added services.

During Bari’s 5 years at Moniker, she managed a portfolio of their top 500 registrar clients and assisted in the domain sales of Scores.com, Poker.ca and Dating.com.

There’s an article that was posted on TheNextWeb.com this morning about domain industry veteran Divyank Turakhia, and I believe it may be of interest to you. The article is about his company Directi and its Media.net property, which has seen huge growth since its launch at the end of 2010. The company is aiming to take market share away from Google’s contextual advertising business (Adsense).

I thought it was interesting to see that “Directi is now a holding worth $350 million (“or maybe more”) and expects to employ roughly 1,000 people by the end of 2012.” The article continues and mentions that about half of Directi’s employees are working for Media.net, which is remarkable considering its only been in business for a couple of years.

Other businesses in the Directi portfolio that domain investors may be familiar with include Skenzo, Logic Boxes, DomainAdvertising.com, among others. Andrew Allemann, publisher of Domain Name Wire, also works for Directi in its Austin office.

Ironically, I received a couple of emails from Media.net sales staff (including one last week) asking me about opportunities to supplant Adsense on two of my websites. I have not tried them yet, but it is something I would consider using them if I thought the opportunity was right.

The article is well worth reading when you have a chance.

After months of private beta testing, Escrow.com  just publicly launched its long awaited broker product. The video above explains how it works, but essentially, it allows a domain broker to seamlessly and privately originate a deal between a buyer and seller, with Escrow.com acting as the intermediary.

Andrew Rosener of Media Options, a successful independent domain broker, has been testing out the product for a while and shared some insight with me:

“The Escrow.com broker tool has been critical in our business since we started using it and helping Escrow.com to develop it around our needs.  It has truly been tailor fitted to what a broker needs in order to help both a buyer and seller complete a transaction seamlessly and transparently, or in some cases privately when either buyer or sell does not want their identity to be known by the other party.  The broker tool allows us to hand hold individuals who are not familiar with the online escrow process and may be seeing Escrow.com for the first time.  We’ve been able to much more efficiently close deals with less man power and less emails between parties in order to explain the escrow procedures.”  

One benefit that might cause some additional discussion is that the broker can set one purchase price for the buyer and a lower price for the seller, allowing him to keep the commission amount private. Instead of working on behalf of a buyer or seller, the broker could be working more as a middleman and could possibly make a far greater profit on a deal than if it were transparent. However, at the end of the day the cost of this transaction is actually lowered, since in the past the broker would have to pay two escrow fees, one on the buy and one on the sell.

For instance, a broker may be able to acquire a name for $10,000 and immediately sell it for $25,000. The broker would be able to agree to buy the name from the owner for $10,000 while the buyer is agreeing to the deal at $25,000. The broker would earn $15,000 on the deal, minus the Escrow.com fee. There are a number of people that buy and flip names, and this shortens the timeframe on transactions.

The broker product was just launched today. To start a transaction, visit Escrow.com and log in, click “Start a transaction,” select domain name, and choose your roll as “broker.”

Investopedia is a very popular financial website that is described as “a premiere resource for investing education, personal finance, market analysis and free trading simulators.” Based on some analytics I found, it likely gets over a million monthly visits. People visit Investopedia to learn about trading and investing strategies, market news, and for information about various types of investments.

I saw that Investopedia added a new article about domain names last week, and I think it’s pretty neat to see. The article, written by Justin Kuepper, is titled, “How To Make Money With Domain Names,” and it covers a few popular topics such as investing in various types of domain names, buying and selling names, and the risk of domain investments.

The article summary is quite succinct:

“Like any investment, domain names come with their own set of risks. However, for diligent investors who consider the risks and returns thoroughly, domain names can become an investment that yields high returns, and a unique way to diversify his/her portfolio of investments.”

If you could add to the Investopedia article, what information do you think is essential that is missing? Personally, I think it’s a pretty solid write-up that covers investments, and I think it would be beneficial to add information about investing in alternative extensions and ccTLDs. Hopefully, they will turn this article into a series of articles on the topic of domain name investments. Perhaps they might benefit readers by adding links to popular resources, like domain forums, news outlets, and blogs.

There was a pretty huge surge of traffic to my blog yesterday after the NameCheap article, and my blog’s server went down for a bit of time. One thing I really like about Liquid Web is that the tech support team worked hard on my behalf to quickly upgrade the server size, and it was back up and running within about 30 minutes with no ill affects. Thanks to them for their help – it’s their 24 hour service that I really like. Here are some updates.

• According to a CNet article written by Paul Sloan,  Mike Mann’s 11,000 registration  day turned into a grand total of 14,962 hand registered names.  You can read quite a bit about Mike Mann’s background in today’s article, including some information about how he got his start in the domain business. I think you can glean that Mann is one of the foremost experts when it comes to buying and selling domain names, so his strategic purchase of nearly 15,000 hand registered domain name will almost certainly pay off for him, especially considering his Domain Market platform and sales team that works on his behalf.

• One of the most interesting things in the article is that Mann reports that Domain Market “brings in about $400,000 a month.” If you follow Mann on Twitter or Facebook, you know that most of his sales aren’t splashy names that sell for huge individual numbers. He is regularly making end user sales on domain names he probably hand registered or bought on the drop within the last few years.

• There are two interesting articles about Go Daddy Auctions on HybridDomainer.com and DomainShane.com. Should be interesting to see if GoDaddy adapts and how they do that. The big winner will likely be DomainTools since their Whois history tool can help see the registrant prior to privacy if that’s what they do.

• As posted on my website, I sold CallCenters.com this week. The buyer is a company in the business, and I don’t know whether additional information about the sale will be released. I think the company got a great domain name, and I was satisfied with the sales price. Although I found the buyer on my own, I want to thank Sedo and Afternic for putting together solid presentations on how they could sell the domain name on my behalf.

• One tip based on two recent sales. Try to encourage the buyer to keep the domain name at the current registrar. It can take up to 7 days for a registrar transfer, where an account change/push takes seconds. You’ll finish the transaction and be paid by Escrow.com much more quickly. Make sure the buyer knows he can transfer it to a registrar of his choice once he has possession of the domain name.

• Has anyone tested on the new LeadRefs platform yet? I have no tried it out but it looks promising. If you’ve tried it out, let me know your thoughts and let me know whether I should sign up.