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.
Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools to try and see when the domain name was acquired. In early 2015, the Connection.com domain name was registered to a company in Toronto. In late 2015, the domain name was registered to PC Connection. Most interestingly, in October of 2015, the domain name was briefly registered to a company called The Treadstone Group. This is a company that stealthily acquires domain names on behalf of clients.
A search of PC Connection annual report filings from the last 10 years mentioning the “domain name” phrase shows filings from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. In the 2016 filing, there’s a sentence that seems to connect all of the dots I discovered: “At December 31, 2015, our intangible assets included a domain name that was purchased in October 2015 for $450, which has an indefinite life and is not subject to amortization.”
In short, PC Connection appears to have acquired the Connection.com domain name in October of 2015, and the company reported a $450,000 acquisition in October of 2015.
If NameBio agrees that Connection.com was acquired for $450,000 and adds the sale to its database, it will rank in the top 25 sales of 2015. I am comfortable enough with the data to add it to the Embrace.com list of recent one word .com sales.
When I searched Twitter last night, I did not see any mentions of the Connection.com sale. George Kirikos mentioned that the sale was previously archived in DNJournal, and he had tweeted about the sale when he noticed it a few years ago:
This was old news, see @DNJournal https://t.co/jNpmbOI9a1
and their charts. @namebio probably just missed it back then. https://t.co/lf1Jk2UMbr
— George Kirikos (@GeorgeKirikos) August 15, 2022
Nice find Elliot! Those SEC reports certainly taking some digging!
This was already reported by me in 2016, and was charted by DNJournal back then. See:
https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2016/20160323.htm
(and also onTwitter) Thus, the only ‘news’ is that NameBio must have missed it 6 years ago.