Domain Sales

Last night, I spent some time searching the SEC database to see if I could find some domain name sales data. I believe I found a large sale that has not yet been reported elsewhere. It looks like the Connection.com domain name was acquired for $450,000 by PC Connection in 2015. The PC Connection website uses the Connection.com domain name.

I came across a PC Connection Annual Report filing from March of this year. In the report, there is a sentence that states, “At December 31, 2021, the Company’s intangible assets included a domain name for $450, which has an indefinite life and is not subject to amortization.” These figures are in the thousands, which means the company had previously acquired a domain name for $450,000. At this point, I guessed that the $450k name was Connection.com.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared that I began forwarding my inventory-quality domain names to Embrace.com landing pages. I respond directly to offers and inquiries, and I push prospective buyers to Dan.com landing pages to complete the purchase. I don’t do this for higher value domain names.

I am testing this to save time and to lock in deals that might have failed if I set the price or minimum offer amount too high. By jumping in between the buyer and a Dan.com landing page, I am able to adjust the asking price, minimum offer, and LTO options before giving them to the buyer. Since I don’t regularly update domain name prices, this gives me the opportunity to adjust based on market or business conditions.

I thought I would share how I am responding to inquiries and offers while testing this method:

In April, I reported on HubSpot’s acquisition of Connect.com. At the time of the sale, the acquisition price was not shared publicly by either buyer or seller. On Sunday, George Kirikos uncovered a SEC filing with the $10 million sale price, and he was the first to publish an article about it.

I reached out to BrandForce Co-Founder and Vice President Louis Pickthall to see if he like to comment about the deal. I also asked him where this domain name sale ranks on his company’s list of top sales. Louis replied, and shared this with me:

The NFTs.com domain name was acquired for $15 million, according to a press release I was sent by a representative from Escrow.com. According to the release, the deal was brokered by Domainer.com and GoDaddy. The sale was facilitated by Escrow.com. This is one of the largest publicly reported domain name sale of all time. It is the second largest publicly reported sale in the past few years, following the $30 million sale of Voice.com in 2019.

The buyer and seller of NFTs.com are not publicly known at this time. The domain name is currently registered at GoDaddy under Whois privacy. The domain name has been privately registered since March of 2021. Prior to that, GDPR obscured the registrant of the domain name.

Here’s the press release I received this morning: