Some of you may or may not know of Richard Gabriel… He recently sold Call.com for $1.1m, DropShippers.com for $1.5m, Auction.com for $1.7m and two other mega-sales in recent years which have gone unreported: Hgh.com for close to $6m and PlasticSurgeons.com for a cool $18m.

Who the hell would drop $18m on a domain that valuates at only $87,000? LOL… That is pretty crazy, right? No. The company who acquired PlasticSurgeons.com is noneother than Moxy Media aka Tsavo aka SWI aka like a million other things… I lost count. It’s impossible to keep up with their entity names becuase they seem to re-structure and so on every year or less… I wonder why

They needed the domain for their newly launched venture called ExpertHub. I’ve wrote about them before over a year ago over at WannaDevelop.com actually. All I can tell you is that… They are an interesting bunch with a fascinating history that have been around for a while who do a lot behind the scenes and fly under the radar as much as possible, hence the millions of different names they operate under and many divisions.

Moxy Media received $160M in funding from AmericanCapital.com back in early 2007. American Capital is a publicly traded private equity firm and global asset manager with $14 billion in capital resources under management. So few month’s later, loaded with all this money… Moxy Media / ExpertHub shelled out lots of cash for quite a few category killer domains.

I am sure PlasticSurgeons.com wasn’t the only ultra-expensive domain, but all of the biggest domain deals always happen behind the scenes and almost always go unreported. I just so happen to stumble across Richard Gabriel’s domain portfolio website and the prices for the marked sold domains were right there. Great!

Anyways, a few month’s ago ExpertHub.com was acquired by Internet Brands who is a huge player in the vertical media / community niche… They have over 100 unique properties and do close to $100 million annually in revenue… How much did they shell out for ExpertHub? We don’t know, but definitely in the low-mid 8 figures I’d say.

So you gotta wonder… What is the REAL highest price paid for a domain ever? $14m and $18m is a lot of money, without a doubt, but I think there have been even bigger deals over the years. Frank Schilling has put out a nice post recently which explains… “The World Changes But Domain Names Stay The Same” and he’s so right.

Values of category leading domains in health, finance, entertainment and few other “easy and big money” niches will always increase, today, tomorrow… Next year, the year after that, etc… and if they are put to good use thanks to proper development… Cha-ching $$$$$$