Business.com sold again

The Wall Street Journal reported today that internet giant Business.com has been sold for a whopping $345 Million. Telephone-directory company R.H. Donnelley Corp. finalized the deal for the Web-based B2B and B2C directory on Thursday.

The Business website was founded by entrepreneurs Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton in early 1999. Both partners were thought of as insane for putting a $7.5 million price tag on a single Internet domain name (Business.com) at the time.

WSJ:

This deal represents the increasing influence of the Internet in the yellow-pages and white-pages business of Donnelley, which publishes paper and online directories in many states under the AT&T, Dex and Embarq names, among others.

Business.com works as a web directory. It allows users to search for business services, while collecting a bounty for sending Internet traffic to individual merchants via inclusion payments.
I have used Business.com in the past as both a business owner and consumer. As a business owner, I didn’t see a whole lot of traffic for the price but that was more because of my particular niche than anything else.

A sale of this magnitude makes the initial $7.5mil many years ago seem like petty cash. I hear that Winebaum, one of the original founders, will be returning to the website following the takeover.

This makes one wonder what Business.com will sell for next time around. Anyone care to take a guess?

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