July 27, 2007 | Friday
The £168 million search deal
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |PPC
Actually, at this moment’s exchange rate, business.com is the £168,590,119.73 search deal. It sold for $345 million to print and online Yellow Pages publisher R.H. Donnelley Corp yesterday. Donnelly beat out Dow Jones, the New York Times and other bidders to capture the most expensive piece of internet real estate in the web’s (admittedly brief) history.
Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton, who sold to Donnelley, paid a relatively modest $7 million for the domain in 1999, so have managed to flog it for 47 times as much as they paid for it. Oh, and they sold it for 23 times its $15 million annual revenue.
Sure, you could stick almost any site at business.com and have a hard time not making a bunch of money off of it. The domain carries much of this deal’s value. But what clinched this mega-purchase is search.
As CEO Winebaum says of Donnelley and business.com:
We’re both search engines and directories. Their online yellow pages and our business search engine are both essentially the same concept. We’ve focused exclusively on the B2B space, where we put business decision makers in front of business advertisers. And they have focused exclusively on local consumers looking for the products of local merchants. Product-wise, we’re in the same exact business serving different markets.
What Donnelley’s online Yellow Pages have been missing is pay-per-click search - something business.com has made work for them with great success. Business.com, at its essence, is a search engine and PPC network. The fact that this is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to multiple investors - and ones from the sinking ship that is the Yellow Pages - should send a strong signal to marketers about the direction their investment should be taking.
Search engine marketing connects customers in the market to buy with companies that can sell them exactly what they want. It’s not intrusive, it does not interrupt, and it delivers customers who are as far down the buying cycle as you’d like. Not many of them are going to make a £168,590,119.73 purchase in a single transaction, but the returns are massive and measurable. (Shameless plug: If you’d like to find out more, please feel free to get in touch with Emma Hovell on 0207 952 8011 or .)
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