Here’s Another Domain You Might Buy: www.MainstreamMedia Desperation.com
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 22, 2007 at 4:20 AM PT
When Santa Monica, Calif.-based incubator eCompanies paid $7.5 million in 1999 for the rights to the domain name business.com–nearly twice what Compaq paid the year prior to buy altavista.com, the name of its search engine–conventional wisdom was that the company’s founders were out of their minds. “It is going to be the bargain of the century,” eCompanies co-founder Sky Dayton told Internet World at the time. “It is going to look like we bought the island of Manhattan for $7.5 million and some beads.” That quote made him a bit of a laughingstock in certain circles and landed eCompanies the No. 35 spot on that year’s list of “The Dumbest Moments in e-Business History.”
Well, look who’s laughing now. Business.com is up for sale and some say it could fetch anywhere from $300 million to $400 million from media companies in need of some online growth–Dow Jones or the New York Times, for example. That’s quite a bit of money for what’s essentially a directory of sponsored listings. Still, it does make money–$15 million a year or so. So, a $350-million acquisition price would be 24 times current revenue. Not bad for an initial investment of $7.5 million and some beads …
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