Major domain deals have been reported almost every week recently. Last week was actually marked by two. Near.com was sold for $1.15 million by Near, a Singapore-based company offering local partner and customer search services to small and medium-sized businesses. The domain clearly suits this company best. The sale was listed as the eighth largest in the top sales chart of this year – and almost immediately went down to the ninth place.
Domain investor and blogger George Kirikos sleuthed yet another brilliant find. Kirikos specializes in reviewing the financial statements submitted by public companies to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and published on the SEC website. This extremely time-consuming job sometimes helps reveal the amounts companies spend on domains in private deals. This time George Kirikos found proof that insurance technology company Hippo Enterprises had spent $3.3 million on purchasing a domain name in the first quarter of 2021. Kirikos analyzed the data, the name of the company and the fact that Hippo.com had changed its registrant around the same time and pieced the puzzle together. The Hippo.com sale thus tops the chart of the biggest deals of the year to date. The domain has eclipsed Christmas.com sold for $3.15 million, according to DN Journal.
