Social.com Reportedly Sold For $2.6 Million. Who's The Buyer?

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

This was the topic du jour on some domain name industry blogs yesterday, but I haven’t seen much coverage beyond that. According to DN Journal, a contract for the sale of the domain name Social.com has been signed by both the seller (an individual named Scott Carter) and the buyer (undisclosed for the time being). We’re trying to confirm this with Carter.

You may remember that the domain was to be auctioned off on at DOMAINfest Barcelona with an opening bid of $5 million. The high reserve wasn’t met before the auction ended, but a bid for $2.5 million did come in at one point.

Now it appears a $2.6 million deal has been forged in the wake of DOMAINfest Barcelona, which DN Journal reports was co-brokered by Moniker.com’s John Mauriello and Marksmen’s Cyntia King on behalf of the latter’s new sales division at NameQuiver.com.

And to think you could have bought it for $50,000 back in 1997.

Still according to DN Journal, the buyer is an unidentified individual or company based in the UK. The domain name industry blog points out Marksmen provides IP and trademark protection for businesses, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Anyone care to venture a guess about the identity of the buyer?

Company: Moniker
Website: moniker.com

Moniker is a domain name registration and auction site. Currently, our domain name registrar services directly registers domain names across the generic Top Level Domains (TLD’s) .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and Country Code Top Level Domains such as .us and .cn. Moniker will soon offer more than 200 Country Code Extensions along with many of the newly approved TLD’s due to launch over the next 24 months.

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