Earlier today, I had four Super Intelligence tools read On Holding AG’s financial statements and infer what the company paid for the ON.com domain name. Three of the four landed on roughly CHF 15 to 16 million, about USD $16 to 17 million, by spotting an anomalous CHF 16.4 million of additions to “Patents, licences and other rights” in 2022 and backing out the routine spending.
This post gets to the same number by a completely different road. To my knowledge, it is a road nobody has taken before in domain name reporting: inferring the original purchase price from the amortization the asset leaves behind in later years. The result is $16.7 million, give or take a couple of hundred thousand, and it is worth a post of its own, for reasons that go beyond ON.com.
This morning, dommunity posed a challenge on X: was the ON.com domain name acquired for more than $10 million? Kudos to dommunity, who is one of the few accounts in the domain name space that consistently produces valuable original content rather than regurgitating other people’s. The second half of the same post was a pointed remark about a certain kind of operator who waits for people like me to spend hundreds of hours on due diligence and then “lazily generate[s] engaging copy” from it. I will come back to that at the end.
According to a new SEC filing, the Tokens.com domain name has been sold for $5 million.
Neighbourhood Intelligence, Inc. states, on page 37:
Sale of Domain Name
On October 15, 2026, the Company entered into an agreement to sell its Tokens.com domain name to Abraham Strategies Limited for $5.0 million in cash. The transfer of the domain name was completed prior to the issuance of these financial statements, and the Company received the related cash proceeds on October 23, 2026.
Neighborhood Intelligence, Inc. was formerly known as Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc..
According to a LinkedIn post, the transaction was facilitated/brokered by Andrew Miller (ATM Holdings), David Peress (Hilco Global) and Lumis.
In a new financial filing made today, Shopify apparently revealed the purchase price of the Shop.com domain name: USD $99 million
Market America disclosed their sale of the domain name in a press release, however they did not state the transaction price.
In a prior analysis on LinkedIn, I argued that anything less than USD $400 million would be a steal for the buyer, given the enormous potential benefits that would flow to Shopify through their ownership of this domain name.
Shopify will have a conference call later this morning (before the financial markets begin trading), where they may share additional details regarding the transaction.
Some folks might not understand how I obtained the price. I inferred the transaction price from their earnings release, which shows "Acquisition of intangible assets" of $99 million on page 5. That's undoubtedly the Shop.com domain name (it was $0 in the same quarter of 2025, and is a way an accountant would disclose the transaction without actually identifying the domain name). [The EDGAR-hosted copy is Shopify's Q3 2026 earnings press release.]
In addition, their 10-Q filing reveals the same information. Page 11 shows the identical "Acquisition of intangible assets" of $99 million, and page 44 mentions "$99 million used for the acquisition of intangible assets" in the "Cash Flows From Investing Activities". [The EDGAR-hosted copy is Shopify's 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026.]
This represents the highest all-cash transaction price for a domain name, beating the prior AI.com domain name transaction price of $70 million. The new owner of the AI.com domain name claims to have rejected a $500 million offer for it.
However, the $872 million valuation (not a transaction) of the Cars.com domain name has yet to be topped.
This is breaking news, and this article may be further amended as this news is digested.
While I continue to be "on strike" due to the low-life parasitic copycat bloggers who continue to not properly cite original research by others, here's a small taste of what I've been finding in my exhaustive research (I have found many others, that I've not shared).
According to a new SEC filing, the company Doc.com Inc. has revealed an ongoing lease for the doc.com domain name. According to Note 12 on page F-19:
On January 15, 2025, the CEO and President of the Company entered into a Domain Name Purchase and Sale Agreement for the acquisition of the domain name Doc.com. As of June 30, 2026, the Company had advanced $3.10 million to the seller. The total contractual purchase price is $4.85 million, payable in five installments, comprising an initial installment of $1.17 million followed by four equal installments of $920,000 each. The advance represents partial consideration paid toward the acquisition of the domain name and is not interest-bearing.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Company has the right to continue using the domain name pursuant to an existing license arrangement during the installment period. Legal ownership and registration of the domain name will transfer to the Company within seven days after payment of the fifth and final installment.
I believe that the $3.10 million on page F-19 is actually a typo, given that on page F-29, it says $3.01 million. And, if one does the math, $1.17 million + $0.92 million + $0.92 million = $3.01 million (leaving 2 more payments to reach $4.85 million).
This demonstrates the enormous value of short memorable domain names.
Monday is the deadline to submit comments to ICANN regarding the changes to the UDRP and URS in relations to IGOs, which harm the fundamental rights of domain name owners, that I discussed in Friday's blog post.
I'm still working on my lengthy submission (over 100 pages long now), as the ICANN materials are replete with serious issues that harm registrants and I want to be as thorough as I can in the limited time available.
While I work on it further, I fed the latest draft into Google's NotebookLM AI tool, and it generated a relatively high quality podcast summarizing some of the issues.
Since my written submission will be quite technical and dense, folks might find the less technical AI-generated podcast to be more accessible as a general introduction to the issues. If you feel that more time is needed to study this issue, I encourage you to ask ICANN to extend the deadline to the end of summer, via their public comment tool.
The payments started in 2005, and will end in 2040. As I pointed out in 2023, that transaction is still active.
Using the latest AI tools, I figured it would be cool to have a live page (made with Javascript) that shows how much has been paid to date, using the payment terms from the original SEC filing. This was an easy job for Claude Code. Enjoy!
It's been an interesting couple of days, to say the least, since I published the terms of the Green.com domain name transaction on Saturday. The response suggests that some people in the domain name industry are finally beginning to think more seriously about attribution in the modern era, and about the need to properly recognize those who do the underlying work required to uncover original information. That is a welcome development, but it is only a beginning. There is still much more to do, including correcting past failures of attribution.
I have publicly criticized Elliot Silver and his sites, among others, in the past on X/Twitter, as was noted in the Grok analysis of "parasitic journalism" at the bottom of Saturday's post. To Mr. Silver’s credit, he did retweet my latest article. However, that does not go nearly far enough.
He then proceeded to do something that could have been done long ago. Recall that I have effectively been “on strike” since 2022 (4 years ago!), withholding many of my research findings, with only a few exceptions. After Saturday’s post, Mr. Silver finally went looking himself — and found one.
He reported on the sale of MC.com, citing an August 2025 financial statement. This is quite revealing, but not in the way Mr. Silver perhaps intended. This transaction was actually known to me on May 10, 2025 (more than a year ago!), as it was documented in a quarterly filing of that week. Page 28 of that filing stated "The third quarter ended March 28, 2025 includes other income of $2.7 million, related to the sale of the mc.com domain name."
I keep a record of all those deals, and mail them to myself, for record keeping. Below is a screenshot (my Gmail account redacted) of how I recorded it that day, followed by an update today noting it was finally discovered by others.
I would see it repeatedly being disclosed on EDGAR, including on May 5, 2026, i.e last week! See page 29 of the May 5, 2026 filing to find it. So, why did others finally find it today, more than a year after I found it?
The answer is uncomfortable but straightforward: too many people who publish in this industry have not been doing the work. The timing of this discovery is not coincidental. My post on Saturday evidently embarrassed some of them into making a temporary effort to demonstrate that they, too, could uncover original transaction data.
By contrast, I put in the work methodically, systematically, and diligently and have been doing it for a very long time. Below are some scans from a notebook I keep, recording when I last checked EDGAR in detail.
In practical terms, this means checking nearly every weekend and spending substantial time reviewing filings in order to avoid missing important transactions. It also helps reduce overlapping searches, since few results are reported on weekends. The work involves going through large numbers of false positives to find the occasional high-value transaction — the needle in the haystack — which is then often copied, summarized, or repackaged by others.
This is not yet easily automated. AI tools still miss many of these transactions. Nor is this a recent practice on my part. The notes shown above are merely the front and back of one sheet (I have discarded prior sheets once they were full).
It is also worth examining what Mr. Silver did not do. Grok specifically called out the Embrace.com lack of attribution, as per the screenshot below made at the time of this blog post.
The page relegates major original discoveries to “other reports.” That is not adequate. Many of the largest domain name transactions are known only because of my research and reporting. Referring vaguely to “other reports” when the original source is known is intellectually dishonest and ethically deficient.
The appropriate response would be to correct the historical record: each domain transaction report should identify and link to the original reporter and original post wherever known. That standard should apply not only to Mr. Silver’s sites, but to every outlet that reports on domain name transactions. It should have been standard practice from the beginning.
Instead, rather than undertaking the harder task of fixing years of inadequate attribution, Mr. Silver appears to have tried to seize a moment of credit by reporting a transaction that had been sitting in public filings for more than a year. That choice is revealing.
What it reveals is not diligence. It reveals that MC.com could and should have been reported long ago if industry publishers had been doing systematic research. It also reinforces the broader point: much of what passes for domain name journalism has relied too heavily on repackaging the work of others, while failing to properly credit the people who actually found the information.
There are numerous other high-value domain name transactions that remain unreported. Perhaps others will eventually put in the work to find them. Alternatively, if the industry adopted fair attribution practices, I might be more inclined to disclose the many transactions I have already found and withheld.
Publishing those transactions would benefit the domain name industry. Known sales data is valuable. It improves valuation methods, strengthens market transparency, and helps serious participants make better decisions.
But as the conversations over the past few days have shown, too many people in this industry remain focused on short-term traffic, personal credit, and fast-follow articles rather than long-term credibility, proper attribution, and the development of a more serious market infrastructure.
Given the prevalence of parasitic copycat blogging in the domain name industry, I have deliberately held back over the past few years from sharing numerous previously unreported transactions that I uncovered through exhaustive searches of public financial records.
When original research is routinely repackaged by others with minimal attribution or added value, the incentive to publish that research publicly is greatly diminished.
With platforms such as X and Instagram beginning to take a firmer stance against accounts that profit from the work of others by redirecting attention and page views to themselves, perhaps the incentives are finally starting to change. Some may come to regret those practices, or at least think twice before repeating them. But any future restraint does not erase the prior conduct. The past appropriation of others’ work remains a serious problem, and one that has imposed real costs on those who actually did the original research.
As a test to see where things stand, I've decided to share a recent discovery (I still have many others that I've not yet shared). In particular, the Green.com domain name changed hands in the first quarter of 2026 for USD $7.5 million.
Green.com sold for USD $7.5 million, as first reported by George Kirikos
This came to light in a recent SEC filing by IAC, where they noted on page 3:
In Q1, IAC sold an unutilized domain name for $7.5M
To identify which of IAC's domain names sold for the USD $7.5 million, I consulted old lists of domain names owned by large companies, and through the process of elimination, and cross-checking with the WHOIS history of DomainTools.com, saw that it must be the Green.com domain name. This was confirmed via a LinkedIn post by Andrew Miller.
If you see this transaction reported by others, ask yourself, did they repost/retweet the original post/tweet made by me on X/Twitter? Or did they instead create a new post to gain attention for themselves, at the expense of the original author? Did they write a blog post simply regurgitating this news with minimal work on their part, to gain attention for themselves? When you see parasitic behaviour, you're complicit if you don't call it out!
If you appreciate this original content, be sure to engage with my "GeorgeKirikos" account on X, and perhaps I will share more unreported domain name transactions in the future. If I see continued parasitic behaviour, I will refrain from sharing again.
P.S. I had Grok assess the "parasitic journalism" issue. See its analysis here to gain a better understanding of why it's so harmful.
P.P.S. I've written a new article on the aftermath of the publication of this transaction, which delves further into attribution and original research.
While I continue to discover previously unreported domain name transactions in public financial statements, I am mostly refraining from posting new articles due to the widespread and repeated parastic copycat “journalism” in the domain name industry. To understand why parasitic “journalism” is harmful, see this document by Grok, or this document by ChatGPT.
That being said, it's worth revisiting the prior article regarding the Rocket.com domain name transaction, where I was first (like usual) to report on the transaction price, due to meticulous research. In that article, it was clear that the seller obtained $14 million for the domain name, on a net basis.
