Today in The Lowdown:  The domain aftermarket has a new heavyweight champion. In a post on his FreeSpeech.com blog, industry pioneer George Kirikos reported he had discovered the price that Shopify paid for Shop.com - $99 million - to replace AI.com as the highest known price paid for a domain name.

Also inside: The domain aftermarket continued a 4th quarter surge with one its best performances of the year. Two 7-figure sales that rank among the six highest publicly reported sales of the year to date lead our latest chart. We also saw the biggest non .com gTLD sale of the year - a $300,000 .org.

How Ray Dillman Neu, Following in His Dad's Footsteps, Has Taken the Family's Domain Legacy to the Next Level With LabSupplies.com

When Howard Neu co-founded the world's first domain conference with Rick Schwartz in 2004, his wife Barbara and son Ray (an 18-year-old college student at the time) played integral roles in making the historic show a success. Ray grew into the kind of multi-talented man his dad was. He invested in domains, created new conferences, became a deputy sheriff and is now a commercial airline pilot!

Last year Ray harnessed the power of artificial intelligence and a category defining domain name - LabSupplies.com - to co-found a new business with Barbara that has exploded like a shot out of a cannon. The company's latest coup was becoming an authorized dealer for international healthcare giant McKesson. For Ray and Barbara, the most gratifying part of their new enterprise is that even though Howard is no longer with them, he is the one who started the ball rolling.  Full Story 

Howard, Ray and Barbara Dillman Neu

From Introverted Teenager to Industry Titan: How Yoni Belousov Built a Domain Empire

In the spring of 2002, 15 year-old high school junior Yoni Belousov was sitting at a computer in his Ottawa, Canada home (the very computer he is seen sitting at in the photo at right), fascinated by the ways people were using the rapidly growing Internet to make money online. Over the 25 years since the introverted teenager was staring at that screen, he has left most of the rest of us in his entrepreneurial dust. 

In August Yoni and two minority investors launched a new company, Link Freedom Group, that filed applications with ICANN to run over 300 new Top Level Domains. The cost just to file each application was $227,000, so an initial investment of around $68 million - a mind-boggling jump from where Yoni started.  As jaw-dropping as the numbers are, the route that Yoni took to make it all happen is the best part. Full Story 

A Man of Many Talents: Todd Ryan Juggles Recurring Roles as a Film Writer, Director, Producer, Legal Eagle AND Domain Investor

From small town Indiana to Hollywood, California and back, Todd Ryan has not only left them laughing along the way, he has left them - and us - learning too. The multi-talented Midwesterner holds many titles - CEO (American Business Capital Corp and others), Writer, Producer & Director (ABC Productions), Co-Founder (PayNow.com), Managing Director & Senior Paralegal (JJN Solutions)...and believe or not, that's just the start. There are also the popular podcasts (the Domain Name Law Show and The DNX Show), as well as speaking engagements, including a key role at the 2026 NamesCon Global conference coming up next month in Miami.  

Full Story 

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