Business.com Sale: Wow

So Business.com recently sold for $350 million to R.H. Donnelley, the company that makes the DEX Yellow Pages. The purchase of the domain in 1999 for $7.5M turned heads. Today Business.com produced $15 million in revenue per year. Let’s explore why this is a ripoff.

1. The domain name Business.com is great, but without great content it will not flourish. Look at the top earning sites like Google, Yahoo, Expedia, and Youtube. These domains alone wouldn’t sell for too much today. Your domain doesn’t have to be the best to be successful, your content does.
2. The site is garbage. I’m not sure why anybody would use Business.com. Let’s try a search for Denver lawyers. First we see Featured Listings, followed by Sponsored Links, then Listings, then Web listings, then more Sponsored Listings. Also, don’t forget the Sponsored Listings on the side. It’s basically impossible NOT to click an ad. It uses Google results so it’s basically a cluttered Google. This is equivalent to a Made for Adsense site.

It seems that the traditional Yellow Page companies are starting to panic now that the Internet is starting to replace their big yellow book. DEX saw this as their chance to gain market share in the online world. They would have been better off spending the money improving their listings (verifying information, store hours, pictures, reviews, descriptions, etc.) rather than buying a mediocre site with a great domain.

P.S. DEX, give me a call if you’d like to buy my sites. I can churn out some MFA sites that I’d be happy to sell for 23 times revenue.