Today in The Lowdown: The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) is ready to welcome members back to Las Vegas for their 2024 Annual Meeting that is coming up next month. The ICA just launched a new meeting website that provides a central location for checking out the agenda, finding out who is coming, securing tickets and booking a room at Resorts World.

Also inside: Sedo turned up the heat up our latest all-extension Top 20 Domain Sales Chart with a six-figure sale of a literally hot .com. They wound up with three of the top five entries on the honor roll. The #2 spot went to another hot TLD, .ai, with this one producing one the ten biggest ccTLD sales reported year to date. An $80,000 non .com gTLD sale rounded out the first five.

How Dynadot's Todd Han Turned a One Man Show Into One of the World's Fastest Growing Domain Registrars

Todd Han's domain industry journey began over 20 years ago when his mother asked him to build a website for her. She was able to keep the project "in house" because Todd was already a computer whiz who had  graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in computer science and had recently added a Master's degree in CS from Stanford. When Han started looking at the domain registrars from that era he couldn't find any that he liked, so he decided he would just set up one of his own - after all, how hard could it be? 

"The internet was just taking off and I thought I could build a better registrar," Han recalls. "I was young and naive and had no idea what running a business entailed." Todd would spend the next three years as the only employee of his new company. Over the past five years with dozens now on staff and over 100,000 customers around the world, Dynadot has tripled in size, rocketing to 4.5 million domains under management. Here is how he did it. Full Story Here  

Todd Han
Dynadot President & CEO

The Domain King's Sweetest Deal: How the Sale of GreenRabbit.com Wound Up Putting Over $11 Million in Rick Schwartz's Pocket

On Monday October 1, 2023 the Performance Food Group (PFG)  acquired fresh and frozen foods delivery company GreenRabbit.com for an undisclosed price. Whatever the amount was, PFG, a company that has assets valued at $7.8 billion could easily afford it. There is a fascinating domain back story behind this deal. GreenRabbit.com was a new brand adopted by the owners of Candy.com in 2021 when their business services had expanded far beyond the category they had become a power in after acquiring the Candy.com domain from Rick Schwartz back in 2009. 

Being the savvy businessman that he is, Rick, widely known as the Domain King, crafted the Candy.com deal to give him not only $3 million in cash, but also equity in the company that acquired the domain. So, when GreenRabbit was acquired, 14 years after he sold Candy.com,  Rick, who had picked up $1.7 million from a share sale three years ago, collected another $6.8 million, bringing his total take from the domain to over $11 million!  Full Story Here

Rick Schwartz

Hilco Digital Assets Doubles Firepower with Braden Pollock Joining Andrew Miller at HDA as a Strategic Partner and Stakeholder

15 months ago domain consultant and ATM Holdings Founder Andrew Miller, who has been involved in many of the biggest domain sales in industry history, teamed up with diversified financial services giant Hilco Global to start a new division - Hilco Digital Assets (HDA). The new enterprise hit the ground running, quickly establishing itself as a powerful force in the premium domain space with moves that included a $10 million investment in SquadHelp.com. That funding and Miller's advice helped SquadHelp build and launch their new Ultra Premium Domain Marketplace.  

HDA just doubled their firepower with another big move in welcoming another one of the industry's most highly respected figures, Braden Pollock, on board as a strategic partner and stakeholder. Braden is a long-time investor in both domain names and promising startups. He also owns a world class domain portfolio that HDA will now exclusively represent. Pollock in turn will help put deals together that he and HDA can  jointly invest in.  Full Story Here

Braden Pollock

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