I left NamesCon a bit earlier than usual due to a less than ideal flight schedule to Boston. Unfortunately, that means I missed several panels, including Matt Barrie’s keynote. Because of Matt’s role as President of Escrow.com, he was able to share some valuable domain industry trend data in his keynote presentation.
Because of Escrow.com’s position in the domain industry, I think the company is privy to quite a bit of data that others may not have the luxury of seeing. Jackson Ellsgood, the new General Manager at Escrow.com, shared some of the data from Matt’s keynote, and I am happy to share it with you as well.
Because of the confidential nature of the business, the data is more of a general overview of the domain resale market than a detailed look at individual sales data. Here are some of the more interesting data points from Matt Barrie’s keynote presentation:
- Escrow.com has now facilitated $2,700,000,000 ($2,7 Billion) in transactions
- The company saw $430 million in Gross Payment Volume in 2015
- 60.8% of the company’s users are in the US and 17.8% are in India (the second largest market)
- Escrow.com noted that the value of domain names are increasing. More specifically, domain names are “appreciating at 7.3% per annum over the last five years“
- Four letter domain names have appreciated on average 9.3% per year over the last ten years.
- Escrow.com has seen exponential growth in the Chinese market.
Matt also shared some of the changes that have gone on at Escrow.com since Freelancer.com acquired the company in November. Escrow.com now offers telephone support from 8 AM – 11 PM PST, and the company is working towards providing support at all hours. The company has added Chinese language support, and it has plans to add support for 20+ languages.
One exciting thing that Matt shared is that Escrow.com launched a new website that is currently in beta. Customers can start using the new site by visiting beta.escrow.com. I presume the company would be interested in feedback on the website and/or bug reports. You are welcome to connect with Escrow.com support with feedback or you may feel free to leave comments here.
In addition to the domain industry data that Matt shared, he also gave an overview of Freelancer.com, the company that now owns Escrow.com. Judging by what Freelancer.com is doing and how it is also growing, I see considerable synergy between the two companies.
It’s pretty amazing to see how much Escrow.com has grown, and I am happy to see the changes that are planned.
Beta site looks nice.
Just opened a new sale.
Elliot- this was one of the best keynotes of Namescon – very interesting presentation on both escrow.com and freelancer (did not realize the scope of work that the site encompasses as well) and how both have grown tremendously over the past few years. In addition, they appear to have a ton of tech talent- Agree with you that the beta looks real slick as well!
Mike
That statistic on India is illuminating. Nearly 1 in 5 customer accounts.
I was very surprised by that figure.
It’s arresting. But, then again, it does make sense. India is as big as China – soon to be bigger. English is the country’s lingua franca. They’re very involved in IT and certainly no strangers to domains.