Less than a week after a $15 million sale of NFTs.com was announced, George Kirikos discovered that Hubspot paid $10 million to acquire Connect.com earlier this year. Kirikos found the details in Hubspot's 2Q-2022 SEC filing and broke the news on his FreeSpeech.com blog Sunday. Confirmation of the sales price comes after DomainInvesting.com had reported spotting a transfer of the domain to Hubspot in April.

Two of the four biggest publicly reported domain sales of all time have now come to light in the past five days. NFTs.com is second only to Voice.com ($30 million), followed by Sex.com ($13 million) and new #4 Connect.com. We 

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will be adding Connect.com to our YTD Top 100 Sales Chart and All-Time Top 20 Chart when out next bi-weekly domain sales report comes out August 17. 

There is an interesting back story to the reporting of this information. As regular readers know, George is a veteran researcher who has uncovered countless big money sales over the years (our charts would have bee a lot less impressive had he not been digging this data out and cross checking it to share with the industry). Unfortunately, as happens far too often on the web, some unscrupulous sites and social media accounts have stolen his work and republished it un-credited as if the work was there own. George finally had enough of that and announced he was going to pause his research for the rest of the year to protest what amounts to IP thievery. It has to be especially galling to him because he has done the work and shared the results expecting no compensation (he doesn't accept ads on his sites) other than credit where credit is due for the work done. Uncovering the details of this huge sale of Connect.com on the way out the door for a well deserved break serves as a perfect mic drop moment as it shows how much we are likely to be missing over the next few months.

(Posted August 7, 2022)   

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