Business.com Sold for between $340 million and $360 million

[laura]

The Web's original high-price domain name has been sold again for another lofty price.

Telephone-directory company R.H. Donnelley Corp. clinched a deal for Web-based marketing directory Business.com Inc. for between $340 million and $360 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118541740110378568.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

 

[businessdata]

Interesting, the sale price was in line with their expectations.

Was bought by a couple of guys in 1999 for less than $1m. Stories abound that it was bought for $7.5m – that was not the case, as it was bought for $7.5m of illiquid stock (it sure helped propel the hype over the value of domain names).

They did a very good (but imo not excellent cf its potential) job of developing it as a business search engine that gets 6m monthly uniques.
Its 2007 EBITDA was about $15M. Realistic estimates of the present value of the domain on its own, based on recent big ticket sales, is around $10m.

These guys put a huge amount of work into developing this site, switching revenue models several times and nearly going bust along the way. So nice result for them.