VC comments on Business.com deal

Paul Kedrosky, VC partner at Ventures West, and well known blogger at Infectious Greed writes:

"Okay, we have a new high water mark for a single domain sale. Business.com has been bought by R.H. Donnelly for $345-million. Sure, the company has $50-million in revenues, but don't kid yourself, this is about the domain name. Impressive."

What do you think?

Here is what I think. I think it was the domain branding which made the business model succeed. Sure anyone could have registered A2Zbusinesseslistedhere.net, and probably sold one or two ads. But, thanks to the brand, and the hard work of an ad sales team, 6,000 businesses wanted to be listed at 'business.com'.

But truly, take a look at business.com. It is quite similar to a parking page. In fact, it is a parking page...Just a parking page that goes deep in its number of ad links. It's interesting that in news of the acquisition it was called a 'search directory'. I expect in the future this will become a new name for parking pages that are developed more deeply with ad links. 'Search Directory'.

And to be honest. It has a lot of validity. Compare how quickly you can find what you want specific to business at business.com compared to a search at the major search engines. Having a narrow, topic specific search directory weeds out a lot of irrelevant results... 

Comments

[carl]

interesting. same thing with perfume.com. how much easier a time do you think they'll have attracting customers when they begin to advertise, simply because it's the right name? I say, a lot!