Internet Business Blog

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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I’ve posted a new article on how to appraise your website. Let me know your thoughts!

Here’s a snippet:

Determining the value of your web is not an exact science. It involves a whole slew of variables, guess work, and a little bit of luck. I have created the general guideline below to help give you a good starting point when appraising your site’s value when you believe that it may be time to sell.

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Ever want to know what your domain name or web site is potentially worth? DnScoop.com does a pretty good job of this. It takes into account:

Ok, so maybe such tools aren’t exactly right on the money so to speak, but I feel that it is still a great spot to start when finding the value of a web site and certainly does a better job than Leapfish. Post your results below!

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