Domaining in 2019 has brought some very interesting developments. Here’s a summary of some of the big ones from 2019.
First was the largest .com sale ever with Voice.com selling for $30 million dollars. There were also some other large publicly-reported sales (US amounts):
- california.com sold for $3 million
- eko.com sold for $1.5 million
- tm.com sold for $1.25 million
- rx.com sold for $1 million
- Nursing.com sold for $950,000
- ol.com sold for $900,000
- links.com sold for $797,361
- mastermind.com sold for $600,000
- carrot.com sold for $565,000
- ij.com sold for $550,000
- gorilla.com sold for $496,320
- leads.com sold for $435,000
- cooking.com sold for $402,500
- domainnames.com sold for $370,000
- joyride.com sold for $300,000
- taxes.com sold for $250,000
Overall, international .com domain sales were strong in 2019, with sales exceeding 2018 in total volume and number of sales.
The domain registrar AlpNames was shut down in 2019. ICANN discovered that it was not following its agreement to perform required registrar functions including processing new registrations and allowing existing registrants to renew domain name registrations.
There were also several mergers in 2019 that have had an impact on the international domaining space. Team Blue and Register Group were merged. Team Internet, the owner of Parking Crew and Tonic, a direct traffic operator, was acquired by CentralNic for US $48 million . And Dreamscape purchased web.com for $73 million.
Over at Namepros, NameSilo was voted the best registrar in 2019.
Let’s not forget we also had the fractional ownership experiment.
And the .org sale to Ethos Capital was approved by ICANN. But the sale came with a tremendous amount of push back because it seemed to go against what the .org extension had stood for in the non-profit sector over the last decade.
