Domain transactions are up, although results are flattening so far this year.
Escrow.com parent Freelancer.com (ASX: FLN) reported domain name transaction data today for the first half of 2022.
The escrow service handled USD $407.2 million of transactions during the first half of this year, up 11.1% compared to the same period a year ago. (Freelancer.com is an Australian company that reports earnings in Australian dollars. The strong U.S. dollar hurt its results, but since the majority of its transactions are conducted in U.S. dollars, I’m using USD figures here.)
Domain names made up $256 million of the total. The company previously reported $130 million in domain transactions in Q1, so Q2 transactions were down slightly to about $126 million.
The pandemic was definitely friendly to domain sales, though. The company said domain transactions over the 12 months ending June 2022 were up 85% compared to the same period two years ago.
So far this year, Escrow.com has handled the sale of NFTs.com for $15 million and HubSpot’s acquisition of Connect.com for $10 million. The company cannot report most of the transactions it handles.
While Escrow.com facilitates hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions every year, it takes only a small sliver of that for its role in the transactions. Escrow.com’s revenue in the first half of the year was USD $4.1M up 4.2% year over year. And it costs a lot to run a licensed escrow company; its EBITDA margin was 12% in the first half of the year.
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