DomainInvesting.com

Over a year ago, I tried to buy Prove.com, but the six figure price tag of the domain name was beyond what I could spend for it as an investment. Using the DomainTools Whois History tool, I can see that Prove.com sold sometime between April and July of this year. I just learned that a New York company called Payfone recently acquired Prove.com, and the company announced a rebrand to Prove earlier this week:

We are thrilled to announce that @payfone is now @ProveIdentity! Representing a new era of modern identity authentication & a reaffirmation of our mission: to help companies reach their goals by enabling them to authenticate customers accurately, effortlessly, and privately. pic.twitter.com/i2sXpMNy87

— Prove Identity (@ProveIdentity) July 29, 2020

This morning on Twitter, domain investor Andy Booth tweeted about a successful domain name flip he recently made. Andy reportedly sold Abby.com for $75,000. He bought the domain name in June of this year for $55,000. That would be a little more than a 36% ROI in less than 2 months:

SOLD https://t.co/pRxG5W4RN9 to an end-user @ 75k. Purchased: June 2020 @ 55k.

High reseller price I think, but the buyer’s timing was right for me, so he got a reasonable deal IMO.

— Andy Booth (@Chain) July 30, 2020

Escrow.com published and shared its Domain Investment Index for the second quarter of 2020, and the report was fairly bleak. In fact, as you can clearly see on the quarterly comparison chart on page 2, Q2 2020 had the lowest quarterly sales volume in two years, since Escrow.com began compiling the report. The full report pdf can be downloaded here, and I want to share a few thoughts about Q2.

In Q2, Escrow.com processed $55.2 million in domain name sales, down from $85.8 million in Q1. It looks like the previous low sales figures were in the high $60 to low $70 million range. Here’s a screengrab of the chart showing quarterly sales volume since 2018: