Paid Content reports that RH Donnelly bid the highest for Business.com, going all the way up to $345M for the company that started off with a $7.5M purchase of a URL and a subsequent $10M funding round.
RHD, a publicly traded firm, did $1.895B in 2006 revenues, but only 2% of that (according to PaidContent) - or $38M - came from the Web. So, to remain relevant in the 21st century, it is spending over 10x that in order to reposition itself and strengthen its online presence. In a way, it makes sense, I can’t for the life of me imagine upcoming and existing generations turning to books and print in general for directories and what not…
Interestingly: it has $75M of cash according to Y! finance but $10B in debt, so it is really leveraging its books to shift things online. Of course, is Business.com the best $345M can buy? Probably not… but when you get a paltry $38M out of nearly $2B in revenues from online and your clients are moving online, what’s $345M?
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