The Connect.com domain name has changed hands, and the buyer is HubSpot, a marketing and CRM service provider. HubSpot is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange with a $22+ billion market capitalization. Connect.com transferred to MarkMonitor, and it currently has a MarkMonitor default landing page.

Prior to the sale, Connect.com had been registered under Whois privacy for many years. The domain name previously resolved to a BrandForce landing page powered by Efty. The domain name is still listed for sale via Afternic, and I can see the asking price had been $11.8 million.

In March of 2018, Andrew Allemann reported the $200,000 sale of JumpRope.com. The domain name was acquired by a startup called Jumprope. It was billed as “a platform where users can create, discover, and share how-to videos and tutorial.”

In August of 2021, the Founder of Jumprope announced that the startup was going to be shut down at the end of the month. “To focus on the massive opportunity at LinkedIn, we’re going to sunset the Jumprope platform,” he posted on LinkedIn. “We will be taking down the website and apps later this month, starting August 20.”

When it comes to valuable domain names like JumpRope.com, a closed venture doesn’t mean the end of life for the domain name. In fact, the domain name may be one of the few things that has substantial value post-shutdown.

During the last handful of years, I have done less outbound marketing to sell my domain names. I still enjoy doing it on occasion because it is exciting to close a deal that I completely manufactured on my own. When I have been doing outbound, the call to action is now to direct the prospects to the landing page, which is almost always on Dan.com.

In my email, I usually write something along these lines:

Late last year, I tried to hand register domain names related to a certain trend. I spent a fair amount of time on keyword tool websites and on GoDaddy’s bulk domain registration page, and I ended up finding one domain name that seemed worth buying for the $10 hand registration cost.

Shortly after the registration was processed, I realized the registration was actually a typographical error. It was a two word domain name, and while the first word was spelled correctly, the second word was not. Luckily, I now suppose, even though the second word was a typo, it actually correctly spelled a different word. I did not think the two words made a great domain name combination, so I turned off auto-renew and figured I’d let it ride for the year.