Thoughts

Andrew Miller

September 22, 2024

As Expected, a Robust End of Year

For months, I have predicted a robust 4th Quarter for category defining & exact match .com domains. There have been several recent, important domain transactions; our Hilco Digital Assets sale of Rocket*com, this weeks reported sales of Engine*com to Hotel Engine, https://lnkd.in/eqT-vjZq and Agent*com to Dharmesh Shah (congrats to Dharmesh & to Drew for overseeing). These are the most valid proof of the strategic importance and standalone asset value for domains. If you are a CEO/Founder/VC, watch, listen, and learn from the likes of some of your most successful peers (Dharmesh), industry leading CEO’s like Elia Wallen, and the CEO/Founders on our use cases page, https://lnkd.in/eFS_NYXp, who inherently understand that to get to the next level, it is a must-have to be the .com (ie Agent*ai acquiring Agent*com), and to have the category killer domain (Chat, Gold) and the exact match (HotelEngine to Engine). We are closing some important deals that will happen in Q4, that further validate that the premium domain asset class is more important to success than ever before. All of our domains are at HilcoDigital.com/domains

Let’s Talk About Escrow

I wanted to discuss a topic closely related to premium domain transactions; the use of escrow. I have had discussions with clients that have wanted to use their bank or law firm to handle a domain transaction, at fractions of the cost. While there are options out there on how to close large domain transactions, traditional banks are not one that I recommend anyone of our deals to use. We have very recently overseen several large dollar transactions where alternatives were deployed; In one rare instance on a large dollar transaction, payment with no escrow was agreed to in the domain purchase agreement, made directly between the buyer and the seller, both whom were comfortable that the contract would be sufficient; we have closed deals with GoDaddy representing the buyer and they often require that they handle the money; and with crypto now a prominent payment form, we use Escrow Domains and Bitpay. Sometimes circumstances dictate process (such as these examples) but to be clear, the escrow provider should be one that has vast experience handling money and domain names for domain name transactions (ie Escrow*com) or the money that you are attempting to save will not have been worth it when you are in the midst of a simple issue that a bank does not understand, and someone’s capital is now being tied up unnecessarily.

All articles