Domain Sales

In July of last year, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) launched a social networking service to compete with Twitter, now known as X. The service was branded Threads, and the company used the Threads.net domain name for its platform. Threads.com was owned by another business, which was highlighted in Fast Company following Meta’s Threads launch.

In June of this year, the app running on Threads.com was sold to Shopify. Some people speculated that this acquisition could make the Threads.com domain name available for Meta to acquire for its Threads platform. It looks like this just happened.

In June, with the help of DomainTools, I noticed that the Engine.com domain name was pending transfer and the nameservers had recently changed to Cloudflare. This valuable domain name transferred to Cloudflare, where it is currently registered under Whois privacy.

According to my @DomainTools Domain Monitor alert email, https://t.co/skWspkn2bF is pending transfer and the nameservers recently changed to Cloudflare (domain name doesn’t resolve yet).

It has been registered at GoDaddy under Whois privacy, and it had Afternic nameservers.

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) June 17, 2024

We now know who acquired Engine.com.

The ASAP.com domain name was sold in a bankruptcy auction managed by Heritage Global Partners (HGP). The sale price was $340,000, plus an additional 19% buyer’s premium. The total paid for the domain name was $404,600.

David Barkoff, Senior Vice President at Heritage Global Partners, confirmed the sale has fully transacted. David also let me know that final sale price was solely for ASAP.com, and he shared the following comment about the recently concluded auction:

In what I believe could be one of the top domain name sales of all-time, Hilco Digital Assets brokered the sale of Rocket.com. The domain name is currently pending transfer away from Network Solutions, Whois records at DomainTools show.

This morning, I reached out to Andrew Miller, Managing Director of Hilco Digital Assets, who had previously mentioned the domain name. Andrew confirmed the domain name was sold but could not comment about the sale price. “We can confirm that we oversaw the sale and acquisition of the Rocket.com domain name, in a win-win for the buyer and seller,” he told me via email.