CNBC Discusses Sale Of Business.com

If you have ever wondered what's in a name we have the answer for you, millions in profits if you pick the right one, Brian Shatnam joins us now with more. Hey Brian.

Take yourself back to 1999 for a bit, (makes twilight zone noise) still look like the boom times in the internet business but that's when Jake Winebaum and Sky Daton paid a reported $7.5 million dollars for the domain name business.com. People mocked it especially months later especially when the bubble burst and your mega IPO for the JoeBagOfDonuts.com went down the tubes. Well, eight years later Winebaum has emerged from the wreckage to sell the business he built around the domain name for $345 million dollars to RH Donnelly. It's now a successful B2B web portal and in some ways, despite the bad PR for the purchase price, the bubble bursting was the best thing that could have happened.

Because there was so much carnage in the B2B market we had so many competitors and most of them actually went out of business in the early 2000's. We were able to have this large market pretty much to ourselves for a few years and grow it in a sensible way and in a way that allowed us to capture natural growth in the market .

You might not know RH Donnelly its under the ticker RHD and actually hasn't done particularly well since last month's acquisition. It mainly deals with marketing and advertising for yellow pages. Business.com will help them gain a strong foothold on the web for them. Now for some perspective here. Here are some of the most expensive domain sales numbers are up for debate, you can't ascertain numbers for exact ones but according to DomainNews.com last year's sale of Sex.com was for $14 million dollars but it looked like Business.com tied with Diamond.com in the non-porn category. But one thing to note here about the 1999 deal is that it involved some stock options I am told so when it came time to pay up the actual sale price was less than half of the $7.5 million which makes it even better of a deal when you think of the margins when he sold it, they had a cashflow of $15 million so its arguably the biggest domain sale ever and their traffic, maybe slightly less than a BeckyQuick.com...