Domain Sales

Escrow.com announced the winners of its 2025 Master of Domains awards. The awards are typically given out during NamesCon, but the conference isn’t being held until November. The Master of Domains award is given to the 10 highest grossing domain brokers measured by the size of the deals they closed via Escrow.com during the prior year.

Andrew Rosener won this year’s award for the seventh consecutive year. He and his brokerage, Media Options, have been on the list for nine consecutive years. This is an impressive achievement.

Notably, if you look at the top domain name sales of the year in DNJournal and NameBio, many of these brokers are under represented. This illustrates just how many undisclosed large domain name deals are closed each year.

Congratulations to these award winners.

Andrew Miller from Hilco Digital Assets announced that his company oversaw the sale of Odyssey.com on behalf of Braden Pollock. According to the LinkedIn post, it is Braden’s largest domain name sale.

Commenting on the sale, Braden praised Andrew for helping to make the deal happen. “Andrew had to be creative to get this deal done. In the end it was a win-win,” he told me.

Rob Schutz, who made an Ask Me Anything appearance with the ICA yesterday, announced the Kickstart.com domain name was acquired by a company called Kickstart. Prior to the acquisition, Kickstart had been using KickstartFund.com, and that domain name now forwards to the brand matching Kickstart.com.

Congrats to the team at @KickstartFund for acquiring Kickstart*com. Epic upgrade!

And always a pleasure working with you @andrewrosener. 🤝

— Rob Schutz (@rob) May 6, 2025

In Rob’s post, he mentioned that he worked with Andrew Rosener on the sale. Rob’s Snagged.com represented the buyer, but he was unable to share the sale price with me when I asked.

Although the acquisition price was not revealed, it looks like it held a $499,000 price tag on GoDaddy. The listing was still active this morning, so the former owner should have that listing removed. In looking at Archive.org, the Kickstart.com domain name has been priced around that level since at least 2020.

Acquiring Kickstart.com was a wise move for Kickstart. In fact, there is hardly ever a time that acquiring a brand matching .com domain name isn’t a great decision for a business that has the funds to do so.

I added Kickstart to the list of companies that upgraded its domain name. Perhaps the acquisition price will be shared at some point.

A little over a month ago, I noticed the Fizz.com domain name appeared to have changed hands. Fizz.com, which had been owned by Digimedia, transferred from Tucows to Amazon’s domain registrar with Whois privacy enabled. I noticed this with the help of the Nameserver Monitor tool at DomainTools:

https://t.co/DPiqZD3Lzm, which has been owned by @digimedia, appears to have changed hands.

The domain name transferred from Tucows to Amazon Registrar, where it is now registered under Whois privacy.

Whois changed spotted via @DomainTools Nameserver Monitor.

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) April 4, 2025

I use Carrd for the landing pages for many of my higher value one and two word .com domain names. I don’t know the exact number of landing pages, but it’s probably more than 25. I’ve created and modified a few similar but different versions of the landing pages with the goal of driving traffic to the inquiry form on Embrace.com.

I have owned Receivables.com for a year or two. I have used a fairly simple landing page created with the help of Carrd, figuring prospective buyers would know why they want it and submit an offer via the inquiry form.

You can look at a screenshot of how Receivables.com has looked for quite some time:

Icon.com was recently acquired for $12 million, according to a LinkedIn post from the startup’s Founder, Kennan Davison. The domain name is being used by a new company branded as Icon, which bills itself as “the world’s first AI CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).”

Icon.com was acquired in a deal overseen by Andrew Miller of ATM Holdings and Hilco Digital Assets, representing the seller, and by Lumis, representing the buyer.

Once DNJournal and NameBio add this sale to their year to date publicly reported domain name sales reports, it will easy move into the top spot for 2025, year to date. I have already added it to the list of recent one word .com domain name sales I maintain on Embrace.com. The sale ranks just below the 2024 $14 million sale of Rocket.com, which was also overseen by Hilco Digital Assets.

Here’s Kennan Davison’s full post about Icon and its brand matching Icon.com domain name: