Domain Industry News

Last week, I wrote about the frustration I have had with the DropCatch.com login requirements. It wasn’t unusual for me to login via 2FA to place a backorder on a domain name at DropCatch and then have to go through the login process again a short time later to backorder another domain name. Doing this multiple times per day added a speed bump to my morning. It got to the point that I would not bid on a marginal name to avoid this.

Over the weekend, I noticed a maintenance message on the DropCatch website. I held out hope that the company was going to address an issue that bothers other customers as well.

Escrow.com may be the largest platform for third party domain name domain name sales transactions. This morning, the company unveiled a short report (pdf file) featuring domain name sales trends from the past year. The data shared is based on the 8,500+ domain transactions worth “[M]ore than US$300M” transacted via the escrow service provider for the year. There are still 10 days remaining in 2023, so it is incomplete.

Interestingly, it looks like this is going to be a down year for domain name sales on Escrow.com. According to a report shared by Domain Name Wire in September of 2022, there were $256 million worth of domain name sales transactions in the first half of 2022. The figure shared in today’s report is ‘more than $300 million USD,’ for this entire year, so it could theoretically be any number above $300m. I would imagine that $300m figure is relatively close to the actual figure though. I asked for a bit of clarity to understand how 2023 compares to 2022.