Business.com Sold for $360,000,000

24 years earnings Lol, now that is huge... ! I wished

 

Waoo .........
That is a HUGE sum ....
24 years of earning ??? what's the logic behind that ??
But hay ... big names come with big pockets and yes .. money speaks

Congrats to Seller & buyer

 

Thats really a huge money

Congrats for RH Donnelley

 

I agree. I think its the potential of the domain name and the site itself rather than the current value of it.

 

360 mil, thats almost like 36Towns right there

 

Holy Moly.

$360 Million.

That was a sour deal IMO.

Business.com doesn't offer anything unique which any other site cannot offer. The only thing authentic about it is it's domain name and 10 years of establishment, but $360 Million that's alot.


This is one of those types of deals, when Ebay ditched their Elance when they saw that the future wasn't that bright for it.

 

I just submitted a website in business.com yesterday.
I wonder which owner got my money

 

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want all that money......

 

Thats a huge amount. i wish i was a website geek before and purchase all the good domains and sell it today..

 

Is it the biggest domain deal?

Glad to see it is also a directory.

 

Could be by a long way (much higher than the xxx URl's) and these 3 Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com just fetched $100 million

So its seems business.com is at the top of the pile

But this type of information is great as there is a lot to be learned from success

 

i'm just wondering what the new owner sees in order to be willing to pay 24x earnings. He must have some kind of plan to raise the profits or this sale wld not have taken place....

not sure why you guys say its a good price. It seems like a mighty exorbitant price unless you know exactly how to grow the profits much more to get back the original investment.....

 

kool thats a good high price

 

From the information I gathered the sale is for $345 million and they are expecting to make more than $50 million in revenue this year, so that would make it close to 7x earnings. And you have to take into consideration the domain name is probably worth a lot more than $7.5 million it was worth in 1999. A great deal overall and a boost for online business.

 

where did u hear this info from? That's a big difference from what they are making now.

To me, domain name valuation is only as good as the sales it brings. Unless they are planning to sell this domain again later on, the value of the domain does not bring that much to the table since sales are already accounted for. Besides, $7.5m is nothing compared to the total investment.

 

With the sale alone, they will get free media advertisement, and free backlinks from sites like dp and others. So, its a really great marketing strategy. Who ever decided that , thinks great, just got free publicity. So, think in terms of marketing campaign, and not business takeover .

 

Hi,

I agree with you. But I don't think I have seen any reports on earnings - just cash flow, which are two different beasts. If this is true, they may have no earnings.

My guess, based upon my own experiences with these kind of deals, that there are lots of conditions, earning targets, before the money is paid off. There is one other reason that Donnelly might pay more. They may need to get access to the technology and partnerships quickly - i.e. time to market, because they feel that they need to get into the Internet space quickly. Otherwise, I agree, the price does not make sense.

Rich

 

I think that domain value is a function of how much it would cost for a company to get similar traffic, branding, traction if they would start from scratch with a different, non-branded, non-trafficked domain. Business.com has some amount of branding and traffic. How much would it cost Donnelly to duplicate it. Probably several millions of dollars. However, not $350 million. The rest of the money is probably contingent on Business.com achieving certain earnings, over and above what they are earning today (which could be zero).

Rich

 

I agree, but consider that they could probably achieve all this by purchasing XXX.com for $3 million and putting a few million into SEO. So we still have to account for the other $340 million of the cost of purchase.

Rich

 

Holey shnikeys! These kind of situations the companies spend their whole budget on the domain, and run out of money for content...