Escrow.com’s parent company recently reported financial results for the first half of 2016 and disclosed a major domain name purchase.
This week I had Escrow.com GM Jackson Elsegood on the Domain Name Wire podcast to provide an update on what his company is doing.
Jackson was careful about talking about the company’s financials because its parent company Freelancer.com is public. But the company recently published its results from the first half of the year, which shed light on how the Escrow.com business (and, by extension, the domain business) is doing.
The company handled gross payments of US $203 million in the first half of the year with transaction volume of 30,372. This generated AUS $4.3 million revenue for Escrow.com and a $0.575 million profit for the segment.
Escrow.com’s revenue was up 18% compared to the same period last year, but its second half is going to have to handle more payments in order to top last year’s annual payment volume of US $430 million.
The company’s H1 2016 presentation also discloses that the company bought a domain name for about AUS $1 million that is unrelated to the business. I can’t find the prospective domain name using DomainIQ’s reverse whois. Any thoughts?
Freelancer.de
They said it wasn’t related to their core businesses.
crazy to think escrow.com was sold for only 7 mil.
They did $575k profit last half and I think that’s pre-tax. So about 6x-7x annual earnings.
yeah… former owner didn’t handle that well. I wouldn’t sell for less than $100Million
I’m sure they talked to multiple suitors.
If you want $100million for a website earning $500k per year then you’d never actually sell it.
The domain itself has to be worth at least $800K-$1M on a bad day, and this was during the Chinese hoopla
Do we know what percentage of the revenue is attributable to domains?
I know it’s easily the biggest category