For sale again, Business.com could fetch $400 million
If it's beginning to seem like 1999 all over again in some parts of Silicon Valley, then consider this ominous piece of dot-com investment news. The domain, Business.com, a type of business-to-business portal, is up for sale yet again. The asking price: "anywhere between $300 million and $400 million", The Wall Street Journal reports. Yep, you heard right. That's between £150 million and £200 million, for a b-to-b portal that earned $15 million EBITDA last year, the Journal says.
Who's in the bidding? Newspaper titans Dow Jones & Co and The New York Times & Co.
Business.com has been around for a while, weathering the dot-com bubble to eek out a modest operating profit. But it's most famous to net watchers for going down on the books as the most expensive domain sale ever recorded. Entrepreneurs Sky Dayton and Jake Winebaum paid $7.5 million for the site in the go-go days of 1999, a sale that triggered much talk in the day, that maybe, just perhaps, some of these dot-coms are over-valued.
At $400 million, Business.com would fetch a multiple of nearly 27 times earnings. When was the last time we heard such lopsided number-crunching?
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Posted by: Felipe Miranda | Jan 12, 2008 11:39:56 AM
£200 million - I can't really believe that this domain name is worth that amount of money and how long before you make a profit on that sort of investment? A waste of time and effort methinks!
Posted by: Business Leader | Jan 13, 2008 2:02:50 PM