The offer and acceptance of $345 million for business.com was a great buy for R.H. Donnelly (RHD), and windfall for Internet entrepreneurs Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton, who paid $7.5 million for the domain in 1999.
The site is built around the simple but profitable service of sending business traffic to providers of business products and services. It's been a very good business model for the company. The company is expected to generate over $50 million in revenue in 2007 alone.
R.H. Donnelley Chairman and CEO David C. Swanson said Business.com's ad platform and network "will allow us to improve margins by provisioning search engine marketing advertisers on our own sites and our partner sites first as opposed to just the major search engines."
Once the deal is completed, Winebaum will become president of R.H. Donnelley's interactive unit. The deal is expected to close sometime in the third quarter.
I've always like business.com because it represents a real business model that is boring but makes a ton of money. Most people have mostly ignored writing about it for that very reason.
You would be surprised at how many happy Internet marketers are experiencing the same thing as people fight over the crumbs of the sexy, but crowded space of other Internet businesses that get a lot of media coverage. They laugh all the way to the bank.
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