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:

Hiring a buyer’s broker can be a smart decision a company makes when attempting to acquire a domain name. A buyer’s broker can anonymize the buyer and potentially save in acquisition costs. Simply using a domain broker for an acquisition may not be enough to get a good deal for a buyer. A domain broker may mask his or her identity to reduce the chance that a domain registrant prices an asset with a major corporate buyer in mind.

Marksmen is an intellectual property company that, among other things, helps clients acquire domain names. I’ve seen the company’s name appear in quite a few Whois records, and the domain names have later transferred to corporate buyers. The company posted a tweet to an article about making anonymous test purchases on behalf of clients:

It’s no secret that I like using Dan.com and have found success on the platform. A large percentage of my portfolio forwards directly to Dan.com pages. I use a combination of BIN, BIN+Make Offer, and LTO options shown to prospective buyers. As we seem to be headed into a recession, I decided to test something different with many of my inventory domain names.

Instead of having the domain names forward directly to Dan.com landing pages, I am utilizing my own Embrace.com make offer landing pages once again. Doing so allows me to control the leads. I can communicate directly with them, and importantly, I can follow-up with them over time if a deal is not struck.

Every day, I receive emails from other domain name registrants offering a domain name or multiple domain names for sale. Sorry to say, but I ignore almost all of these emails. The domain names are either uninteresting to me, the email doesn’t have the domain names or prices listed, or the price is far beyond what I would ever spend.

Here are some tips for people who think they might have a domain name I would want to buy. I would imagine others investors might give similar advice when it comes to pitching them domain names: