Domaining in 2019 was a very busy and very interesting year. We saw the largest sale ever reported as Voice.com sold for $30 million.
Chad Wright’s WebQuest and New.Life took 5 of the top 15 new gtld sales with Free.Games being the top reported sale at $335,000.
Money.com.au became one of the top 30 highest cctld sales of all time at $280,000.
Overall sales were strong in 2019, even if we take out Voice.com (but why would we it happened) 2019 will still surpass 2018 in dollar volume, and smash it in number of sales reported. 108,000 total sales in 2019 vs 82,824 in 2018. Sedo will report their last sales of 2019 on January 7 so that number will be going up from here.
.Org was one of the biggest stories of 2019, not only is the domain world abuzz but so is the mainstream media along with Congress. Of course .org is just the testing ground for the big enchilada, .com. If .org can have price caps removed, we all know Verisign is salivating at the thought of removing price caps in .com.
We had domain registrar AlpNames shut down. ICANN invoked the process to protect registrants.
The RAA was terminated after the ICANN organization determined that Alpnames was no longer performing required registrar functions as specified in the agreement. These functions include allowing existing registrants to renew domain name registrations and processing new registrations.
2019 brought more consolidation in the industry with a host of mergers and acquisitions.
Register Group is being merged with Team Blue.
Team Internet was acquired by CentralNic for $48 million. Team Internet is the owner of Parking Crew and Tonic a direct traffic operator, (zero click).
Web.com purchased Dreamscape for $73 million. Dreamscape owns CrazyDomains.
Personalities
Rick Schwartz got into the world of video, creating a YouTube channel and even an animation.
Kate Buckley replied to a critic on Namepros by publishing an open letter. I thought it was good Kate came out and addressed those that questioned her.
Rob Monster, to say 2019 wasn’t the year of Epik is just ignoring the facts. Rob Monster was everywhere and transformed Namepros in my opinion. I stated a few weeks back in one of the many heated threads, Namepros is now people who love Epik vs people who hate Rob/Epik and everyone else is just there to wade through the noise.
It all started back in March when MapleDots posted a thread, What’s going on with Epik and Rob Monster?
The thread that dealt with religion, white supremacy, conspiracy theories, snowflakes, nazis and a whole lot more, ended up in REVIEWS. Why? How? Who knows?
But this is where it began, and anyone can ask Vito from Media Branding to back up my words here, at the time in a chat on the phone, I said to Vito back in March, “Rob Monster is getting his ass kicked.” Vito replied that the thread looked nuts and all over the place. Two weeks later the thread was going full steam and we were chatting again, I said, “Rob needs to build an army.” Vito was like an army?
I said he needs to get people that will counter the people coming after him, you get your people to report the posts of your detractors, they like your posts and dislike their posts, (not that it should matter to grown adults, but it does). 9 months later it is safe to say Rob Monster has built the Epik army. That first thread has 2,759 posts with views of 100,483.
Epik has been busy launching several projects from DNProtect to DNEncrypt, NameInvestors.com and many more.
Sedo introduced new landers without ppc in 2019. Sedo also got a new CEO as Tobias Fliatz stepped down.
NameSilo was voted best registrar for 2019 at Namepros.
Aron Meystedt would like to make owning fractional shares in domain names a thing. His test case was NNR.com.
We asked you what % of reported sales you believe? The top vote getter was 75% followed by 50%.
GoDaddy announced they were doing a $500million share buyback of their stock.
Enom accounts moved to Hover.
Namebio rolled out paid memberships. Michael Sumner continued to add more data in 2019. A complete look at the data was well worth the money for many.
Have a happy and healthy 2020.
