Business.com = $360 Million

[usakos]

Business.com domain reported sold for up to $360M.

Directory company R.H. Donnelley Corp. purchases the Web-based marketing directory for a reported $340M to $360M.

Read the entire news article here

Don't you just wish you owned that domain?

[akula]

depends on my risk profile

there's like 150m registered domains

would i have bought business.com 4 years ago for 2mill hoping to resell it for 360m?

no way. any body who i would have asked for advice, would have told me to get a reality check....to use a euphemism

in all probabilities, in 2007, anybody approaching any financier, in any part of the world with "I need a mill+ to buy a domain", will be politely asked to leave the office

and if the guy is investing his own money to buy domains, he'll simply be dismissed as eccentric

there's nothing brilliant about this deal

it's just market exuberance, like yahoo buying broadcast.com for $2bill and later canning the whole thing

in a wider sense, news like this simply confirms the fact that in entrepreneurship, venture returns are mostly dependent on factors outside of the founder's direct control

you can be the smartest entrepreneur in the world, but it's not the smartest entrepreneurs who make most of money, it's the luckiest entrepreneurs ("lucky" meant in it's scientific definition)

[NeeJam]

Overpriced. Nice to see its not got developed properly again by the new owners too becuase who would purchase a domain for $360 Mill and then just leave it as it currently is.

When it was bought around $7 million thats what in my opinion its still worth around becuase sex.com the most expensive domain until this deal has to be worth more then business.com and sex.com is not worth over $360 million.

[akula]

neejam..great comparison there, but no one really knows what these domains are worth

there's no financial statements/analytics/analyst forecast attached to these domains

there is no large amount of buyers and sellers trading this one domain...there can only be one buyer and one seller at any one time

as such, what ever value they put on these domains should be more accurate than what me or you can put on these domain (because they have more information about these domains than me or you)

these domains aren't exchange traded securities...the only way to tell if 165 is too cheap or to expensive is when the acquirer is gonna have to try to exit their position

other than that, the only information to go is "if somebody paid 165m for a piece of virtual nothingness, they probably know what they were doing"