General Domain Information

Last year, Escrow.com modernized its logo and color scheme, although it only published the new logo on its Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as its advertising banners. This is the first change to the Escrow.com logo in many years.

Because of the nature of its business, Escrow.com needs to be sure customers recognize its website, so  implementation  of a new website with a different color scheme, logo, and layout needs to be done gradually. To date, the company has not modified its active website.

The company just announced that a preview of the new Escrow.com home page is now available to view. Although the preview is still connected entirely to the current operational website, you can have a look at what the new site is going to look like once it’s re-launched.

In my opinion, it looks much more modern that the current site, and I am looking forward to seeing the new site implemented in its entirety. The company welcomes comments about the design and colors on its Facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/EscrowService

Compared to many full time domain investors, I have a pretty trim domain portfolio. I keep anywhere from 15-25 significantly valuable domain names in my portfolio (like Torah.com, Burbank.com, Planners.com, CallCenters.com, DogWalker.com…etc) and the rest are names that are probably less valuable – let’s say under $10,000 each. Some may be worth a lot of money to the right buyer, but most are mid-level investments.

I want to share my portfolio breakdown with you so you can get some idea of my domain investments. I own roughly 475 domain names (possibly a few additional that I didn’t count held in various smaller accounts).

Here is the TLD breakdown for my domain portfolio:

• .com – 97.4%
• .net – .6%
• .org – 1.2%
• .CO – .6%
• .info – .2%

As you can see, most of my domain names are .com and I would say my most valuable domain names are .com assets. They are easier to sell and aren’t very expensive to renew. I don’t think this will change in the near term, although I am open to other extensions should the market change in the future.

If you are willing to share your breakdown, I think it would be interesting to see where others are investing.

DNForum is the first place I really learned that there was a community of domain investors. In fact, the person who told me about DNF was a domain buyer who told me that when I sign up, I would probably stop selling domain names to him, and he was correct.

Because of the popularity of the last contest I held, I thought it would be fun to have a DNForum scavenger hunt on my blog, with the winner receiving a $100 credit from Name.com, courtesy of me.

The winner of this scavenger hunt will be the person who first correctly answers the 10 questions below, or who answers the most questions first (let’s say the best result is 9 answers, the first to do that will win). Since some comments get moderated, the timestamp will determine the timing of submissions, and I will ultimately make rulings on ties or other issues. The contest ends on Wednesday March 14 at 5pm EST.

All of the answers can be found on DNForum.

• What was Adam Dicker’s former username  on DNForum?
• From whom did Adam Dicker buy DNForum (what is that person’s current username)?
• In what month and year did I join DNF?
• What popular (but  controversial) “gossip” website’s domain name was once listed on DNF for $19.95?
• How much does it cost to buy a text link in the DNForum footer each month?
• What are the user names of 3 moderators on the forum?
• What DNForum user has the most  DNF$?
• What US state .com domain name was offered for sale this month?
• Domain Name Wire does an annual industry survey. How many times in the last 6 years did DNForum win for most popular domain forum?
• What is the latest DNF sister website that was launched?

I don’t know if the site goes by DoFo or Dofo or whatever, but I saw a link to it, tried it out, and want to share it with you in case you haven’t seen it or used it yet.

Working in conjunction with DomainTools, you can easily do a Whois search using Dofo. Obviously you can do that anywhere, so here’s what’s neat about Dofo. Instead of visiting a host of other websites to check out various analytics, you can do it all there on the same screen via framed redirected.

Some of the tools self-contained within Dofo include:

• Screenshots.com and Archive.org results so you can see iterations of the site over time
• Hosting and Nameserver history
• Email blacklist information
• Search engine backlink and indexed page results
• Valuate appraisal tool

I don’t know if Dofo stands for something that I missed or if it’s just an easy brand name to remember, but it’s a neat little time saving tool you might want to try out the next time you are researching a domain name or website acquisition.